PART II. THE MODERN PRESS. |
  CHAPTER I. Cheap Popular Literature—Conditions of Cheapness—Popular Literature of Elizabeth's reign—Who were the readers. The history of Cheap Popular Literature is a long and instructive chapter of the history of the condition of the People. Before the invention of printing there was little literature that could be called popular, and none that could be called cheap. But in the very earliest stages of the press all books would be comparatively cheap, and all literature to a certain extent popular. Our first printer, as we regard his works, had a most especial eye to the largest number of readers. We have no record of the price of his books beyond the fact that one of them was sold for 6s. 8d., a price equal to that of a quarter of wheat. But the subjects of his books, for the most part, show that he thought it his especial business to simplify knowledge, and to furnish reading for amusement. We can scarcely call any of his books learned. What there is of science in them was of a popular sort, and illustrated by diagrams. The histories were those of our old legendary chronicles, as attractive even as the romances of chivalry which accompanied them. His poetry was chiefly that of one of the great minds whose essential attribute is that of universality. Caxton went to the largest number of readers that his age presented to him. It is a remarkable characteristic of the first century of printing, not only in this country, but wherever a press was erected, that the highest and most constant efforts of the new art were addressed to the diffusion of the old stores of knowledge, rather than to an enlargement of the stores. The early professors of the art on the continent, in Germany, Italy, and France, were scholars who knew the importance of securing the world's inheritance of the knowledge of Greece and Rome from any further destruction, such as the scattered manuscripts of the ancient poets, orators, and historians had experienced, through neglect and ignorance. The press would put them fairly beyond the reach of any new waste. But after the first half-century of printing, when these manuscripts had been copied in type, and the public libraries and the princes and nobles of Europe had been supplied, a fresh want arose out of the satisfaction of the former want. Men of letters, who did not belong to the class of the rich, anxiously demanded copies of the ancient classics; and their demands were not made in vain. The Alduses, and Stephenses, and Plantins, did not hold it good to keep books dear for the advancement of letters; they anxiously desired to make them cheap, and they produced, therefore, not expensive folios only, as their predecessors had done, but neat and compactly printed octavos and duodecimos, for the general market. The instant that they did this, the foundations of literature were widened and deepened. They probably at first over-rated the demand; indeed, we know they did so, and they suffered in consequence. But the time was sure to come when their labours would be rewarded; and, at any rate, they were at once placed beyond a servile dependence upon patrons. When they had their customers in every great city and university, they did not wait for the approving nod of a pope or a cardinal before they began to print. A new demand very soon followed upon the first demand for cheap copies of the ancient classics, and this was even more completely the demand of the people. The doctrines of the Reformation had proclaimed the Bible as the best spiritual guide and teacher, and the people would have Bibles. The first English Bible was bought up and burnt; those who bought the Bibles contributed capital for making new Bibles, and those who burnt the Bibles advertised them. The first printers of the Bible were, however, cautious; they did not see the number of readers upon which they were to rely for a sale. In 1540 Grafton printed but 500 copies of his complete edition of the Scriptures; and yet, so great was the rush to this new supply of the most important knowledge, that we have existing 326 editions of the English Bible, or parts of the Bible, printed between 1526 and 1600. The early English printers did not attempt what the continental ones were doing for the ancient classics. Down to 1540 no Greek book had appeared from an English press. Oxford had only printed a part of Cicero's Epistles; Cambridge, no ancient writer whatever: only three or four old Roman writers had been reprinted, at that period, throughout England. But a great deal was done for public instruction by the course which our early printers took; for, as one of them says, "Divers famous clerks and learned men translated and made many noble works into our English tongue, whereby there was much more plenty and abundance of English used than there was in times past." The English nobility were, probably, for more than the first half-century of English printing, the great encouragers of our press: they required translations and abridgments of the classics, versions of French and Italian romances, old chronicles, and helps to devout exercises. Caxton and his successors abundantly supplied these wants; and the impulse to most of their exertions was given by the growing demand for literary amusement on the part of the great. Caxton, as we have seen, speaking of his 'Boke of Eneydos,' says, "This present book is not for a rude uplandish man to labour therein, nor read it." But a great change was working in Europe; the "rude uplandish man," if he gave promise of talent, was sent to school. The priests strove with the laity for the education of the people; and not only in Protestant but in Catholic countries, were schools and universities everywhere founded. Here, again, was a new source of employment for the press—A, B, C's, or Abseys, Primers, Catechisms, Grammars, Dictionaries, were multiplied in every direction. Books became, also, during this period, the tools of professional men. There were not many works of medicine, but a great many of law; and even the people required instruction in the ordinances they were called upon to obey, which they received in the form of proclamations. The course of the early printers was based upon the principle that they could produce books cheaper by the press than by the scribe. This point once established, the next fact would be also clear—that the more impressions they printed the cheaper the book could be afforded. Beyond this great fact there was a difficulty. There would arise in their minds the same doubt which has puzzled all printers and booksellers from the time of Caxton to our times; which is at the bottom of all controversies about dear books and low-priced books at the present hour; and which will continue to perplex the producers of books, even should the entire population beyond infancy become readers, and have the means of purchasing books in some form or other. That question is simply a commercial one, and is perfectly independent of any schemes of public or private generosity for the enlightenment of the people; it is—Given the subject of a book, its mode of treatment, the celebrity or otherwise of its author, its amount of matter—what is the natural limit of its first sale, and the necessary ratio of its published price? If the probable demand be under-rated, there will be a high price, which will restrict the natural demand; and if over-rated, there will be a low price, which will curtail the natural profit. This is scarcely a question for enthusiasts for cheapness to decide, upon the broad assertion that a large sale of low-priced books will be more profitable than a small sale of high-priced books. In 1825, Archibald Constable, then the great publisher, propounded to the then 'Great Unknown' his plan for revolutionising "the art and traffic of bookselling." He exhibited the annual schedule of assessed taxes, having reckoned the number of persons who paid for each separate article of luxury; and from that document he calculated that, if he produced every year "twelve volumes so good that millions must wish to have them, and so cheap that every butcher's callant may have them, if he please to let me tax him sixpence a week," he should sell them, "not by thousands or tens of thousands, but by hundreds of thousands—ay, by millions." It is recorded that a worthy divine, instructing his bookseller to publish a sermon of his composition, decided that at least twelve thousand should be the number printed, he having calculated that one copy would be required in each parish by the clergyman alone, to say nothing of chance customers. These statistics were ingenious, but they were not safe guides. The callants did not consent to be taxed sixpence a week; and the rectors and curates did not rush to St. Paul's Churchyard to buy up the limited impression of the sermon. But the Edinburgh publisher, and the rural divine, were nevertheless right in their endeavour to find some principle upon which they could determine the probable demand for a literary work. Constable proposed to himself the union of goodness and cheapness, to create a demand that (still using his own words) would have made him "richer than the possession of all the copyrights of all the quartos that ever were, or will be, hot-pressed." The goodness without the cheapness might have produced little change in the market; the cheapness without the goodness might have been more influential But, with the truest combination of these qualities, there is nothing so easy or so common as to over-rate a demand in the commerce of books. The price of a book aspiring to the greatest popularity can only be settled by an estimate of the probable number of readers at any one time in the community, and by a still more difficult estimate of the sort of reading which is likely to interest the greatest number. The same difficulty arises with regard to every new book, and has always arisen. The amount of the "reading public," with its almost endless subdivisions, arising out of station, or age, or average intelligence, or prevailing taste, is very difficult to be estimated in our own day; and there are not many authentic details ready to our hand upon which we can make an estimate for any past period. We will endeavour, out of these scanty landmarks, to collect some facts relating to the former state and progressive extension of the realms of print. It is no modern discovery that a book cheap enough for the many amongst reading people to buy, and at the same time a book which the many would have a strong desire to buy, would be more advantageous to the manufacturer of books than a dear book which the few only could buy, and which the few only would desire to buy. There is preserved, in the handwriting of Christopher Barker, in 1582, 'A Note of the offices and other special licences for printing granted by her Majesty, with a conjecture of their valuation.'[18] This worthy printer to the Queen probably a little under-rated his own gains, when he says that the whole Bible requires so great a cost, that his predecessors kept the realm twelve years without venturing a single edition, but that he had desperately adventured to print four in a year and a half, expending about 3000l., to the certain ruin of his wife and family if he had died in the time. Of these four editions, three were in folio, and one in quarto. The sale of the folios would necessarily be limited by the cost, in the way that the same unhappy patentee complains of as to his Book of Common Prayer, "which few or none do buy except the minister." But how stands the sale of smaller and less expensive books? Mr. Daye prints the Psalms in metre, which book, "being occupied of all sorts of men, women, and children, and requiring no great stock for the furnishing thereof, is therefore gainful." The small Catechism is "also a profitable copy, for that it is general." Mr. Seres prints the Morning and Evening Prayer, with the Collects and the Litany; and where poor Mr. Barker sells one Book of Common Prayer, "he (Seres) furnisheth the whole parishes throughout the realm, which are commonly a hundred to one." But with all his laments and jealousies, Queen Elizabeth's printer, in those anti-commercial days, had hit the sound principle that is at the root of the commerce of books. There is one of the printers, he says, whose patent contains all dictionaries in all tongues, all chronicles and histories whatsoever; and his position is thus described:—"If he print competent numbers of each to maintain his charges, all England, Scotland, and much more, were not able to utter them; and if he should print but a few of each volume, the prices would be exceedingly great, and he in more danger to be undone than likely to gain." Here are the Scylla and Charybdis of the book-trade. Let "all good books on their first appearance appeal to the needy multitude," says one adviser. Mr. Barker answers, "All England, Scotland, and much more, were not able to utter them." "Let the rich and luxurious be first addressed," say the old traditional believers that dearness and excellence are synonymous. Mr. Barker answers—"Print but a few of each volume, at exceedingly high prices, and there is more danger of ruin than gain." The Note of Christopher Barker to Lord Burghley is an answer to a complaint that had been made in 1582, that the privileges granted to members of the Stationers' Company "will be the overthrow of the printers and stationers within this city, being in number one hundred and seventy-five, and thereby the excessive prices of books prejudiciable to the state of the whole realm." In the absence of any knowledge of the numbers printed of a book, and of its consequent price, at the time of this complaint against the monopolists of charging "excessive prices," it may enable us to form some estimate of the character of the books issued in 1582, and thence of the quality of the readers of books, if we glance at two other sources of information—Ames and Herbert's 'Typographical Antiquities,' and Mr. Collier's 'Extracts from the Registers of the Stationers' Company.' The latter is especially valuable, as showing what was doing in the most popular literature—the literature of ballads and broadsides, of marvellous adventures and merry tales—which matters Ames and Herbert rejected in a great degree. In the twenty-fifth year of Queen Elizabeth then, we learn that the printers of London had a good deal of work to do, in the production of Bibles, Testaments, and Prayer-books—of ABC's, Primers, and Catechisms; of divinity, chiefly controversial; of almanacs and prognostications; of Latin books for grammar-schools; of grammars and dictionaries; of statutes and law-books. This was the staple work of the press, which had been going on from the beginning of the century, and constantly increasing. We learn from the 'Privy-purse Accounts of Elizabeth of York,' that, in 1505, twenty pence were paid for a Primer and a Psalter. This sum was equal to a week's wages of a labourer in husbandry. The Primer and the Psalter were scarcely for the labourer. In 1516 'Fitzherbert's Grand Abridgment,' then first published, cost the lawyer forty shillings—a price equal to the expense of a week's commons for all the students of Fitzherbert's inn. No doubt a century of printing in England had greatly lowered the price of all books that were essential instruments in the learned professions, or for the conduct of school education. But in the reign of Elizabeth the class of general readers had arisen; a class far more extensive than that of the clerks and noble gentlemen to whom our first printers addressed their translations of the classics, their French and Italian romances, their 'Gesta Romanorum,' their old chronicles, and their early poetry. It was a time of travel and adventure. In this year, 1582, we find printed 'Discovery and Conquest of the East Indies,' 'Discovery and Conquest of the Provinces of Peru, and also of the rich Mines of Potosi,' 'Divers Voyages touching the Discovery of America' (Hakluyt), 'Acts and Gests of the Spaniards in the West Indies,' 'State of Flanders and Portugal.' 'A Discourse in commendation of Sir Francis Drake' had appeared in 1581. Frobisher had received his poetical 'Welcome Home,' by Churchyard, in 1579. Of historical works, we have none printed in 1582, with the exception of 'The Life, Acts, and Death of the most noble, valiant, and renowned Prince Arthur,' which the readers of all classes would receive with undoubting mind as an authentic record. But solid books of history had very recently been produced. Holinshed had published his 'Chronicles;' Guicciardini had been translated by Jeffrey Fenton, and Herodotus by B. R. The rude historical Drama was then just arising to familiarise the people with their country's annals. In ten more years the press would teem with play-books; for the triumphant era was approaching of those who, in 1579, Stephen Gosson denounced to uttermost perdition in his 'Pleasant invective against poets, pipers, jesters, and such-like caterpillars of a commonwealth.' That species of popular literature is almost absent from the Registers of 1582; but the materials upon which much of the romantic drama is founded were familiar to the readers of this period. Who were the readers, we may judge from the titles of some of these novels. One will indicate a class:—'The Wonderful Adventures of Simonides, gathered as well for the instruction of our noble young gentlemen as our honourable courtly ladies.' The translators and writers of these romances seem to have had no notion of a class of readers beyond the circle of the rich and the high-born. Sidney's 'Arcadia' is called 'The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia;' and in his Dedication to "My dear Lady and Sister," he says, "It is done only for you, and to you; ... for indeed for severer eyes it is not, being but a trifle, and that triflingly handled." A few years after came Robert Greene, and other writers of imagination, who were equally starved in writing plays for the stage-managers and stories for the stationers. Greene's 'Pandosto,' afterwards called 'Dorastus and Fawnia,' is a small quarto of 56 pages, in which Shakspere found the story of 'The Winter's Tale.' The author describes this novelet as "pleasant for age to avoid dreary thoughts; profitable for youth to eschew other wanton pastimes; and bringing to both a desired content." He dedicates it "To the Gentlemen Readers, Health;" and to these "Gentlemen" he says, "If any condemn my rashness for troubling your ears with so many unlearned pamphlets, I will straight shroud myself under the shadow of your courtesies." The scholar was addressing the "gentlemen" of the Inns of Court and of the Universities. He was looking to a ruder class of readers when, in 1591, he published 'A Notable Discovery of Cosenage,' having himself, as he confesses, kept villainous company. This tract he addresses "To the young Gentlemen, Merchants, Apprentices, Farmers, and plain Countrymen." Here is a great extension of the reading public: but we have some doubts if Greene's tract ever reached "Farmers and plain Countrymen." The question arises, how were books to be circulated in the provinces? It was more than a century later before some of the largest towns, such as Birmingham, had their booksellers. The pedlers who kept the fairs and markets were the booksellers of the early days of the press. The last new pamphlet travelled into the country in the same pack with the last new ruff; it travelled many miles, and found few buyers. And yet for some popular books the demand was not contemptible. Sir Thomas Challoner translated 'The Praise of Folly,' of Erasmus, which was published in 1577; and the Stationers' Company stipulated with the publisher that he should print "not above 1500 of any impression," and that "any of the Company may lay on with him, reasonably, at every impression." Mr. Collier, who gives this curious extract from "the Stationers' Registers," thinks that this meant "sharing the profits." It meant that whilst the sheets were at press any member of the Company might print off a reasonable number for his own sale. To "lay on" is still a technical term in printing. Challoner's Erasmus was an amusing book for the scholar, and had, no doubt, a special sale amongst teachers and students. Philip Stubbes, in his 'Anatomy of Abuses,' first published in 1583, bitterly complains that "pamphlets of toys and babbleries corrupt men's minds and pervert good wits;" and he especially laments that such books, being "better esteemed and more vendible than the godliest and sagest books that be," have caused "that worthy Book of Martyrs, made by that famous father and excellent instrument in God his Church, Master John Foxe, so little to be accepted." We might have concluded that, even in those days of limited bookselling, the great popular book of the 'Acts and Monuments' would have had an universal sale, with its wonderful woodcuts and its deep interest for the bulk of the people. But when its excitement was simply historical, two centuries afterwards, the same book would be found in many a peasant's cottage, for the sole reason that it might be purchased in small portions by a periodical outlay. Whilst the wares of worthy John Fox were sleeping in the bookseller's warehouse, the people were buying their 'Almanacs and Prognostications,' which Christopher Barker, speaking of their patentee, calls "a pretty commodity towards an honest man's living." They were buying, in this year of 1582, 'The Dial of Destiny,' an astrological treatise; 'The Examination and Confession of Witches;' 'The Execution of Edmund Campion, the Jesuit;' 'The Interpretation of Dreams;' 'A Treatise of the rare and strange Wonders seen in the Air.' They were buying 'A Ballad of the Lamentation of a modest Maiden being deceitfully forsaken;' A Ballad entitled 'Now we go, of the Papists' new overthrow;' 'The picture of two pernicious Varlets, called Prig Pickthank and Clem Clawback;' 'A Ballad entitled a doleful Ditty, declaring the unfortunate hap of two faithful friends, the one went out of her wits and the other for sorrow died.' They were buying story-books in prose and rhyme,—accounts of murders and treasons, of fires and earthquakes,—and songs, "old and plain." The Court had its 'Euphues, very pleasant for all gentlemen to read;' and the City its mirror of Court manners, entitled 'How a young gentleman may behave himself in all companies.' If we look very broadly at the character of the popular literature of the middle period of the reign of Elizabeth, and compare it with the popular literature of our own day, we shall find that the differences are more in degree than in kind. We have purposely selected the period before the uprising of our great dramatic literature, which must have had a prodigious effect upon the intellectual condition of the people. There was a great deal of training going forward in the grammar-schools for the sons of tradesmen, and of the more opulent cultivators; but the rudiments of knowledge were not accessible to the labourers in rural districts, and the inferior handicraftsmen. There was, probably, no great distinction in the acquirements of the gentry and the burgesses. Some read with a real desire for information; some for mere amusement. Newspapers were not as yet. In the country house where reading was an occupation, there was Hall's 'Chronicle,' and Stow's 'Chronicle,' and, may be, his rival Grafton's; there was Painter's 'Palace of Pleasure,' Tusser's 'Five Hundred Points of good Husbandry,' and, though Philip Stubbes denies its popularity, Fox's 'Book of Martyrs.' Chaucer and Gower had become obsolete in the courtly circles; but Surrey, and Sackville, and Gascoigne were dozed over after the noontide dinner. The peers and commoners who came to Court and Parliament bought the new Travels and Discoveries, and carried them into the country, for the solace of many a long winter evening's curiosity about "antres vast and deserts idle." The Greek and Roman classics were becoming somewhat popularly known through translations. But it is tolerably clear that much of the light reading, and most of the cheapest books, were rubbish spun over and over again out of the novels of Bandello, and Boccaccio, and Boisteau, and losing their original elegance in hasty and imperfect translations. The taste for such reading received its best counteraction when the stage became a noble instrument of popular instruction; and when those who did not frequent the theatres had a wondrous store of exciting fiction opened to them by a few plays of Shakspere and many more of his contemporaries. It was in vain that puritanism, such as that of Prynne, denounced "the ordinary reading of Comedies, Tragedies, Arcadias, Amorous Histories, Poets," as unlawful. They held their empire till civil war came to put an end to most home-studies, except that of party and polemical pamphlets. But even in the tempestuous times that preceded the great outbreak, Sir Henry Wotton, quoting the saying of a Frenchman, laments that "his country was much the worse by old men studying the venom of policy, and young men reading the dregs of fancy." ArchÆologia, vol. xxv. page 100, &c. CHAPTER II. Imperfect Civilisation—Reading during the Civil Wars—Reading after the Restoration—French Romances—First London Catalogue, 1680—Authors and Booksellers—Subscription Books—Books in Numbers—The Canvassing System. In a condition of society which may be characterised as that of a very imperfect civilisation—when communication is difficult, and in some cases impossible; when the influence of the capital upon the provinces is very partial and uncertain; when knowledge is for the most part confined to the learned professions—we must regard the rich upper classes precisely in the same relation to popular literature as we now regard the poor lower classes. We must view them as essentially uncritical and unrefined, swallowing the coarsest intellectual food with greediness, looking chiefly to excitement and amusement in books, and not very willingly elevating themselves to mental improvement as a great duty. When Ben Jonson speaks of the "prerogative the vulgar have to lose their judgments, and like that which is naught"—when he derides the taste of "the beast the multitude"—he also takes care to tell us that his description of those who "think rude things greater than polished," not only applied to "the sordid multitude, but to the neater sort of our gallants: for all are the multitude; only they differ in clothes, not in judgment or understanding."[19] About the time when Jonson wrote thus—more calmly than when he denounced "the loathed stage, and the more loathsome age"—Burton was exhibiting the intellectual condition of the gentry in his 'Anatomy of Melancholy:'—"I am not ignorant how barbarously and basely for the most part our ruder gentry esteem of libraries and books; how they neglect and contemn so great a treasure, so inestimable a benefit, as Æsop's cock did the jewel he found in the dunghill; and all through error, ignorance, and want of education." Again, he says, "If they read a book at any time, 'tis an English chronicle, St. Huon of Bordeaux, Amadis de Gaul, &c., a play-book, or some pamphlet of news; and that at such seasons only when they cannot stir abroad." The "pamphlet of news" was a prodigious ingredient in the queer cauldron of popular literature for the next half-century. Every one has heard of the thirty thousand tracts in the British Museum, forming two thousand volumes, all published between 1640 and 1660. The impression of many of these was probably very small; for Rushworth, to whom they became authorities, tells us that King Charles I. gave ten pounds for the liberty to read one at the owner's house in St. Paul's Churchyard. This was the twenty years' work of Milton's "pens and heads, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas." Others were, "as fast reading, trying all things." Milton asks, "What could a man require more from a nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge?" He truly answers: "wise and faithful labourers, to make a knowing people, a nation of prophets, sages, and worthies."[20] The "wise and faithful labourers" were scarcely to be found in the civil and ecclesiastical violence of these partisan writers. But they were the pioneers of constitutional liberty; and till that fabric was built up, literature, properly so called, would offer few things great or enduring. The demand for books in that stormy period was, doubtless, very limited. The belief that the ????? ?as????? was written by Charles I. would naturally account for the sale of fifty editions in one year. But from 1623 to 1664 only two editions of Shakspere were sold; and when the Restoration came, an act of Parliament was passed that only twenty printers should practise their art in the kingdom. The fact, as recorded by Evelyn, that at the fire of London, in 1666, the booksellers who carried on their business in the neighbourhood of St. Paul's lost as many books, in quires, as were worth 200,000l., is rather a proof of a slow demand than of the enormous extent of bookselling. In the vaults of Saint Faith's were rotting many a copy of what the world has agreed to call "heavy" books; books in advance of their time; books that no price would have made largely saleable—the books for the few. The terrible quarter of a century that had preceded the Restoration, and the new tastes which the return of the Stuarts brought to England, would seem to have swept away even the remembrances of the popular literature of Elizabeth and James. Edward Phillips, the nephew of Milton, has a remarkable passage with reference to the poets: "As for the antiquated and fallen into obscurity from their former credit and reputation, they are for the most part those who have written beyond the verge of the present age; for let us look back as far as about thirty or forty years, and we shall find a profound silence of the poets beyond that time, except of some few dramatics, of whose real worth the interest of the now flourishing stage cannot but be sensible."[21] This was written in 1674. What had the people to read who had forgotten Spenser, and Daniel, and Drayton; and Herbert—who knew little of Shakspere, except in the translations of Davenant and Dryden; and who, unquestionably, had small relish for the popular prose of another age, such as Bacon's 'Essays'? They had rhyming tragedies; they had obscene comedies; they had their Sedleys and Rochesters. It is not wonderful that the popular taste soon grew corrupted. Pepys says (1666), "To Deptford by water, reading Othello, Moor of Venice, which I ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good play; but having so lately read The Adventures of Five Hours, it seems a mean thing." Their "light reading" was a marvel—that romance literature which at one time was as popular in its degree as the shilling novel of our own day. We have before us Mr. Samuel Speed's Catalogue of Books, printed for him in 1670. The first is 'Pharamond, the famed Romance, written by the author of those other two eminent volumes Cassandra and Cleopatra.' These famed and eminent volumes are large folios, translated from the French of M. de la Calprenede. If Calprenede was the Dumas, Madeleine Scudery was the Eugene Sue of those days. No popularity that these moderns have obtained by their feuilletons could have exceeded the excitement produced here, as well as in France, by the wonderful folios of their predecessors. 'Artamenes' and 'Clelia,' to say nothing of 'Almahide' and 'The Illustrious Bassa,' were in every mansion of the ladies of quality. The matron and her daughters sate at their embroidery while the companion read aloud, night after night, a page or two of these interminable adventures, in which Greeks and Romans talked the language of the Grand Monarque; and the intrigues of the court, and the characters of its personages, were mysteriously shadowed forth in what were called "Portraits." What signified that they were stupid? They were as level to the comprehension of their high-born readers as the penny novels of the present day are to the intelligence of the factory-girl. They had a long popularity, and were reprinted again and again, in their eight or ten volumes, when the age of duodecimos had arrived. They had been fashionable, and that was enough. Character they had none, and very little of human passions. They were constructed upon the admirable recipe of MoliÈre in the 'PrÉcieuses Ridicules'—a lover without feeling; a mistress without preference; mutual insensibility; sedulous attention to forms; a declaration in a garden; the banishment of the lover by the coquetting fair; perseverance; timid confessions; rivals; persecutions of fathers; jealousies conceived under false appearances; laments; despairs; abductions; and all that. Mammas thought they were wisely instructing their daughters, when they permitted Mademoiselle Scudery to teach them "des rÈgles dont, en bonne galanterie, on ne saurait se dispenser." In vain MoliÈre, and Boileau, and Scarron laughed at the great heroic romances. They held their own till Le Sage in France, and Defoe and Fielding in England, spoke the language of real life. They show us how long the great and little vulgar will feed upon husks, till some real fruit is offered to them. But it is remarkable how, in the same age, works of real genius and works of intense dulness will run side by side. It may be a question how far 'Don Quixote' drove out the romances of chivalry. 'Tartufe,' and 'Le Malade Imaginaire' were of the same era as that of the wonderful productions in which Cyrus was talking galanterie to Mandane through a thousand folio pages. When Pepys thought 'Othello' a mean thing compared with 'The Adventures of Five Hours' he also bought "Hudibras, both parts, the book now in greatest fashion for drollery;" but he tells us his honest mind when he says, "I cannot, I confess, see enough where the wit lies." Voltaire had a different standard of taste when he wrote, "I never met with so much wit in one single book as in this." The politics of 'Hudibras' made it "in greatest fashion;" the wit shot over the heads of the idle, dissipated, slavish, and corrupt courtiers who gave it their patronage, but eventually left its author to starve. Butler became popular in another generation; and so did Milton. The first edition of 'Paradise Lost' sufficed for a circulation of seven years. The earliest Catalogue of Books published in this country contains a list of "all the books printed in England since the dreadful fire, 1666, to the end of Trinity term, 1680." The statistical results of this catalogue of the productions of the press for fourteen years have been ascertained by us. The whole number of books printed was 3550; of which 947 were divinity, 420 law, and 153 physic; 397 were school-books, and 253 on subjects of geography and navigation, including maps. About one-half of these books were single sermons and tracts. Deducting the reprints, pamphlets, single sermons, and maps, we have estimated that, upon an average, 100 new books were produced in each year. About the time when this catalogue was published, John Dunton, one of the most eccentric, and perhaps therefore amusing, of the publishing race, went into business with half a shop. He can tell us something of the manufacture of some of these books of the London catalogue. He says, "Printing was now uppermost in my thoughts; and hackney authors began to ply me with specimens as earnestly, and with as much passion and concern, as the watermen do passengers with oars and scullers." He adds, "As for their honesty, 'tis very remarkable. They'll either persuade you to go upon another man's copy, to steal his thought, or to abridge his books which should, have got him bread for his lifetime."[22] There were varieties of this class:—"Mr. Bradshaw was the best accomplished hackney author I have met with; his genius was quite above the common size, and his style was incomparably fine." Dunton had a suspicion that Bradshaw wrote 'The Turkish Spy,' which might justify somewhat of his eulogium. Roger North says that "the demi-booksellers," who deal in "the fresh scum of the press," are such as "crack their brains to find out selling subjects, and keep hirelings in garrets, at hard meat, to write and correct by the great; and so puff up an octavo to a sufficient thickness, and there is six shillings current for an hour and a half's reading, and perhaps never to be read or looked upon after." The people get these wares cheaper now. The publishers of that day, and long afterwards, were not very nice as to the uniform excellence of the books they issued. Dunton informs us that Mr. William Rogers, who was the publisher of Sherlock and Tillotson, was concerned in publishing "some Dying Speeches." They had books for all tastes, and carried their goods to many markets. They were equally at home in Cheapside or at Sturbridge fair; and the great Bernard Lintot exhibited his "rubric posts" in his shop, and kept a booth on the Thames when it was frozen over. Some, according to Dunton, were "pirates and cormorants;" others, who had "the intimate acquaintance of several excellent pens, could never want copies." Some were good at "projection"—the devisers of "selling subjects;" and the talent of some "lies at collection," which Dunton exemplifies by Mr. Crouch, who "melted down the best of our English histories into twelvepenny books, which are filled with wonders, rarities, and curiosities." One, who "printed The Flying Post, did often fill it with stolen copies;" whilst Jacob Tonson, who paid Dryden like a safe tradesman as he was, and made him presents of melons and sherry, is very indignant that the great poet charged him fifty guineas for fourteen hundred and forty-six lines, when he expected to have had fifteen hundred and eighteen lines for forty guineas. Peace to their manes! They were all doing something towards the supply of that great want which was beginning to assert itself somewhat extensively in their day. They were, for the most part, rugged dealers in wares intellectual. They had many modes of turning a penny beyond the profits which they derived, as publishers, from "the great genius" or "the eminent hand," which each patronised. They had some difficulties in their way as manufacturers; although the more cautious and lucky did make fortunes. The more limited the public, the more uncertain the demand. They were pretty safe with their tracts, and their abridgments, and their new comedies; but when they had to deal with works of learning, which were necessarily costly, they and their authors—for the authors had often to sustain the charges of printing—encountered serious losses. We shall see how, as the commerce of books extended, new measures were adopted to lessen, if not to remove, the risk. Amongst the 'Calamities of Authors' there are many touching records of "Solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty," produced by printing books that met with no ready sale. Purchas was ruined by his 'Pilgrimes;' Castell by his 'Lexicon Heptaglotton;' Ockley by his 'History of the Saracens;' Rushworth by his 'Historical Collections.' Bishop Kennett gave away his 'Register and Chronicle,' saying, "The volume, too large, brings me no profit." The remedy was to be found in publishing by subscription. This plan, like most other human things, was subject to abuse; but it was founded upon a true estimate of the peculiar risks of publishing. It is manifest that, if a certain number of persons unite in agreement to purchase a book which is about to be printed, the author may be at ease with regard to the issue of the enterprise, and the subscribers ought to receive what they want at a lower cost than when risk enters into price. For more than half a century nearly all the great books were published by subscription; and the highest in literature felt no degradation in canvassing themselves with their "subscription receipts." It is easy to perceive, by the subscription prices, when the work was set on foot by an author, or his friends, simply as a more convenient mode of obtaining or bestowing money than begging or borrowing; and when there was a real market value given for the commodity offered. The scheme of levying contributions upon subscribers was as old as the days of Taylor, the Water Poet. He published his 'Pennilesse Pilgrimage' in this fashion; and it seems that he sometimes gave his books to those who were unwilling to return his honorarium. He consoles himself by a lampoon against his false subscribers:— "They took a book worth twelvepence, and were bound To give a crown, an angel, or a pound; A noble, piece, or half-piece, what they list,— They past their words, or freely set their fist." Honest John had sixteen hundred and fifty such subscribers; but of these, seven hundred and fifty were "bad debtors."[23] In the next century, Myles Davies has the same story to tell of the degradation of the literary begging-letter writer. He leaves his books at the great man's door; he writes letter upon letter, "with fresh odes upon his graceship, and an account where I lived, and what noblemen had accepted of my present." He walks before the "parlour-window," and "advances to address his grace to remember the poor author." At last his parcel of books is returned to him unopened, "with half-a-guinea upon top of the cargo," and "with desire to receive no more." Heaven, in its mercy, has relieved the tribe from these heartbreaking disgraces. There may be "the fear that kills," but there is no longer the patron who starves. Goldsmith has described the devices and the abasement of the little man in the coffee-house, who "drew out a bundle of proposals, begging me to subscribe to a new edition he was going to give the world of Propertius, with notes." His plans were more ingenious and diversified than those of Myles Davies: "I first besiege their hearts with flattery, and then pour in my proposals at the breach. If they subscribe readily the first time, I renew my request to beg a dedication fee. If they let me have that, I smite them once more for engraving their coat-of-arms at the top." Forty years after Myles Davies, Samuel Johnson was enduring the anxieties attendant upon the subscription plan, although friends stood between the author and the customer. He writes to Burney in 1758, "I have likewise enclosed twelve receipts (for Shakspere); not that I mean to impose upon you the trouble of pushing them with more importunity than may seem proper," &c. Long was the subscribed Shakspeare delayed; and the proud struggling man had to bear Churchill's malignity, as well as the reproaches of his own sense of honour:— "He for subscribers baits his hook, And takes your cash; but where's the book?" Well might Johnson write, in more prosperous times, "He that asks subscription soon finds that he has enemies. All who do not encourage him, defame him." Johnson and his publishers set no price upon their books, as a gratuity to the author, beyond their common market value. But great men had gone before them, who regulated their subscription prices by a higher estimate of the value of their works. Steele had received a guinea an octavo volume for the republication of 'The Tatler;' Pope had six guineas for his six quarto volumes of 'The Iliad;'—"a sum," says Johnson, "according to the value of money at that time, by no means inconsiderable." The subscription to Pope's 'Shakspeare' was also six guineas for six volumes. Johnson's projected translation of Paul Sarpi's 'History of the Council of Trent' was only to be charged twopence a sheet. That seems to have been the ordinary price of subscription books during the first half of the eighteenth century. Du Halde's 'China,' which appears to have required a great deal of what "the trade" call "pushing," was advertised by Cave at three halfpence a sheet; besides the attraction of a complicated lottery-scheme, with marvellous prizes. When the subscribers to a new book were served, the remaining copies were sold, generally at superior rates. Sometimes, in the case of high-priced works, the unsold copies lay quiet through the mildew of a quarter of a century in the bookseller's warehouse. At Tonson's sale, in 1767, Pope's six-guinea Shakspeare had fallen to sixteen shillings for the hundred and forty copies then sold as a "remainder."[24] Many of the subscription books were remarkably profitable. The gains of Pope upon his 'Iliad' are minutely recorded in his Life by Johnson. Lintot paid the expense of the subscription copies, and gave the poet two hundred pounds a volume in addition. Lintot looked for his remuneration to an edition in folio. The project was knocked on the head by a reprint in Holland, in duodecimo; which edition was clandestinely imported, as in the recent days of French editions of Byron and Scott. Lintot took a wise course. He went at once to the general public with editions in duodecimo, at half-a-crown a volume, of which he very soon sold seven thousand five hundred copies. But it may well be doubted if Pope would have made five thousand three hundred pounds, if he had originally gone, without the quarto subscription process, to the buyers of duodecimos. Perhaps even the duodecimos would not have sold extensively without the reputation of the quartos. There was no great reading public to make a fortune for the poet out of small profits upon large sales. Some may think that Pope would have been as illustrious without the ease which this fortune gave him. It may be so. But of one thing we are clear—that in every age the higher rewards of authorship, reaped by one eminent individual, are benefits to the great body of authors; and thus that the villa at Twickenham had a certain influence in making what the world called "Grub-street" less despicable and more thriving. It dissociated authorship from garrets. Yet it is marvellous, even now, how some of the race of attorneys and stockbrokers turn up their eyes when they hear of a successful writer keeping a brougham, and lament, over their claret, that such men will be improvident. In those days of subscription books there were great contrasts of success and loss; of steady support and capricious neglect. Conyers Middleton made a little fortune by his 'Life of Cicero,' in two volumes quarto, published in 1741. His suspected heterodoxy was no bar to his success. Carte, in 1747, printed three thousand copies of the first volume of his 'General History of England,' for which he had adequate support. In that unlucky volume his Jacobitism peeped out, in a relation of an astonishing cure for the king's-evil, produced by the touch of the first Pretender, who, he says, "had not at that time been crowned or anointed." Away went the "remainder" of the three thousand volumes to the trunk-maker, and of the subsequent volumes only seven hundred and fifty were printed. Whether by subscription, or by the mode of fixing a published price for a general sale,—which, in the second half of the century, was superseding the attempt to ascertain the number of purchasers before publication,—there was always a great amount of caprice, or prejudice, in the unripe public judgment of a book, which rendered its fate very hazardous and uncertain. Hume, in 1754, published the first volume of his 'History of England.' He says, "Mr. Millar told me that in a twelvemonth he sold only forty-five copies of it." Gibbon published the first volume of his 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' in 1776: "I am at a loss," he modestly tells us, "how to describe the success of the work without betraying the vanity of the writer. The first impression was exhausted in a few days; a second and third edition were scarcely adequate to the demand; and the bookseller's property was twice invaded by the pirates of Dublin." Thomson's 'Seasons' was lying as waste paper in the publisher's shop, when one Mr. Whatley purchased a copy; and his authority in the coffee-houses brought it into notice. Collins was not so fortunate. His 'Odes' would not sell. He repaid the bookseller the price he had received for the copyright, settled for the printing, and burnt the greater part of the impression. We have put together some of these scattered facts, to show how difficult was the publication of books before a great general public had been raised up to read and purchase, and how the risk of expensive works was sought to be lessened by taking hostages against evil fortune. The subdivision of large books into weekly or monthly numbers was one of the expedients that was early resorted to for attracting purchasers. Some curious relations of the first days of number-publishing are given in a rare pamphlet by the Rev. Thomas Stackhouse, the author of the well-known 'History of the Bible.' In 1732 two booksellers, Mr. Wilford and Mr. Edlin, "when the success of some certain things published weekly set every little bookseller's wits to work," proposed to this poor curate of Finchley "to write something which might be published weekly, but what it was they knew not." At the Castle Tavern, in Paternoster Row, the trio deliberated upon the "something" that was to have a run. Edlin was for a "Roman History, brushing up Ozell's dull style, when the old thing would still do in a weekly manner." Wilford was for 'Family Directors.' Stackhouse proposed the 'New History of the Bible.' Wilford backed out; Edlin and Stackhouse quarrelled. The divine wanted many works of commentators and critics. The bookseller maintained "that the chief of his subscribers lived in Southwark, Wapping, and Ratcliff Highway; that they had no notion of critics and commentators; that the work would be adapted to their capacity, and therefore the less learning in it the better." Stackhouse got out of the hands of this encourager of letters, found another publisher, and prospered, as well as he could, upon the subscriptions to his "four sheets of original matter for sixpence."[25] Many of the number-books were published under fictitious names of authors; and some actual authors, clerical and lay, lent their names to works of which they never saw a line. One of the most accomplished of the number-book writers was Dr. Robert Sanders, a self-created LL.D. He produced Histories of England, in folio and quarto, under various names. He was the writer of the Notes to the edition of the Bible, published in 1773, under the honoured name of Dr. Henry Southwell. The ingenious note-writer has told the story without reservation:—"As I was not a clergyman, my name could not be prefixed to it. Application was made to several clergymen for the use of their names; and at last Henry Southwell, LL.D., granted his." In a year or two the indefatigable Sanders was ready with a scheme for a larger commentary. He found a Doctor who would lend his name for a hundred pounds; but such a sum was out of the question. A mere A.M. was purchased for twenty pounds; but the affair broke down. The commentator relates that he was told by the proprietors "they had no further occasion for my services, and even denied me my week's wages." We hope the laborious Sanders was less scurvily treated by the publishers of that immortal work of his, which has been the glory of the number-trade even up to this hour, namely, 'The Newgate Calendar, or Malefactor's Bloody Register.' How many fortunes have been made out of this great storehouse of popular knowledge is of little consequence to society. It may be of importance to consider how many imps of fame have here studied the path to glory. Sanders had a rival—the Rev. Mr. Villette, ordinary of Newgate—who published the 'Annals of Newgate, or Malefactor's Register,' &c., "intended as a beacon to warn the rising generation against the temptations, the allurements, and the dangers of bad company." In this title-page "the celebrated John Sheppard," and "the equally celebrated Margaret Caroline Rudd," are leading attractions. The author of the 'Annals,' no doubt, prospered better than he of the 'Calendar.' Poor wretched Sanders, during the period when he was correcting Lord Lyttleton's 'History of Henry II.,' had "a weekly subsistence;" but in 1768 he writes, "During these six weeks I have not tasted one whole meal of victuals at a time."[26] The original race of number-publishers had no very exalted notion of the value of literary labour. Their successors had no will to bestow any payment upon literature at all, while they had the old stores to produce and reproduce. They have now been forced into some few attempts at originality. But the employment of new authorship is a rare exception to their ordinary course. When the necessity does arise, there is always perturbation of mind. In a moment of despair, when his press was standing still for some of that manuscript which, in an unlucky hour, he had bargained for with a living writer, one of this fraternity exclaimed, "Give me dead authors, they never keep you waiting for copy!" Many good books have, however, been produced by the early number-publishers. We may mention Chambers' 'CyclopÆdia,' Smollett's 'History of England,' and Scott's 'Bible.' Some well-printed books are still being produced, but the compilers help themselves freely to what others have dearly paid for. Taken as a whole, they are the least improved, and certainly they are the dearest books, in the whole range of popular literature. The system upon which they are sold is essentially that of forcing a sale; and the necessary cost of this forcing, called "canvassing," is sought to be saved in the quantity of the article "canvassed," or in the less obvious degradation of its quality. The "canvasser" is an universal genius, and he must be paid as men of genius ought to be paid. He has to force off the commonest of wares by the most ingenious of devices. It is not the intrinsic merit of a book that is to command a sale, but the exterior accomplishments of the salesman. He adapts himself to every condition of person with whom he is thrown into contact. As in Birmingham and other great towns there is a beggars' register, which describes the susceptibilities of the families at whose gates beggars call, even to the particular theological opinions of the occupants, so the canvasser has a pretty accurate account of the households within his beat. He knows where there is the customer in the kitchen, and the customer in the parlour. He sometimes has a timid colloquy with the cook in the passage; sometimes takes a glass of ale in the servants' hall; and, when he can rely upon the charms of his address, sends his card boldly into the drawing-room. No refusal can prevent him in the end leaving his number for inspection. The system is most rife in North and Midland England; it is not so common in the agricultural South, although it might be an instrument of diffusing sound knowledge amongst a scattered population. If an effort were honestly made to publish works really cheap, because intrinsically good, upon "the canvassing system," that system, which has many real advantages, might be redeemed from the disgrace which now too often attaches to it, in the hands of the quacks who are most flourishing in that line. The number-trade was a necessary offshoot of that periodical literature which sprang up into importance at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and which, in all its ramifications, has had a more powerful influence than that of all other literature upon the intelligence of the great body of the people. CHAPTER III. Periodical Literature—Prices of Books; 18th Century—Two classes of Buyers—The Magazines—Collections of the Poets—The Circulating Library—Cheap Book-Clubs. On the 8th of February, 1696, our friend John Dunton completed the nineteenth volume of 'The Athenian Mercury, resolving all the most nice and curious questions proposed by the ingenious.' This penny tract, published twice a-week, consisted of a single leaf. "The ingenious" ceased to question, and "The Athenian Society," as the bookseller called his scribes, ceased to answer, after six years of this oracular labour. There came an irruption of the barbarians, in the shape of "nine newspapers every week." John proposed to resume his task "as soon as the glut of news is a little over." The countryman waiting for the river to roll by was not more mistaken. In 1709 there was one daily paper in London; twelve, three times a-week; and three, twice a-week. Amongst those of three times a-week was 'The Tatler,' which commenced April 12, 1709. The early Tatlers had their regular foreign intelligence. They were as much newspapers as 'The Flying Post' and 'The Postboy.' But Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., very soon discontinued the information which he derived from letters from the Hague and advices from Berlin. He had something of a more original character to offer his readers. The state of popular enlightenment at this period has been described by Johnson in his Life of Addison:—"That general knowledge which now circulates in common talk was in his time rarely to be found. Men not professing learning were not ashamed of ignorance; and in the female world any acquaintance with books was distinguished only to be censured." Steele and Addison had to form the taste of the new generation that they were addressing. They knew that there was a large class craving amusement, who might at the same time be refined and instructed without the pretensions of "the budge doctors of the stoic fur." They meddled little with politics. They left the furious discussions about Church and State to papers with an earnest political purpose, of which Charles Leslie, a violent Tory, thus spoke in his 'Rehearsals:'—"The greatest part of the people do not read books; most of them cannot read at all: but they will gather together about one that can read, and listen to an Observator or Review, as I have seen them, in the streets." The Tatler has been described as a great success; but we may measure that success by that of the more popular Spectator. In No. 555 of that work Steele says,—"The tax on each half-sheet has brought into the Stamp-Office, one week with another, above 20l. a-week, arising from the single paper, notwithstanding it at first reduced it to less than half the number that was usually printed before the tax was laid." The tax being a halfpenny, this would only show a daily circulation of 1600, and of about 3000 when it was unstamped. But the sale in volumes, according to the same statement, was as high as 9000 of each volume. This fact gives us a higher notion of the popularity of these charming papers, and of the consequent extent of general reading, than any other circumstance in the literary history of that period. But even the comparatively small daily sale was of importance, as showing that the great middle class was beginning to seek something better than could be found in the coarse and meagre news-sheets. The annals of 'The Gentlemen's Society at Spalding' record that in April, 1709, some residents there heard of the Tatlers, and ordered them to be sent to the coffee-house in the Abbey-yard:—"They were accordingly had, and read there every postday, generally aloud to the company, who could sit and talk over the subject afterwards." The narrative goes on to say that "in March, 1711, the Spectator came out, which was received and read here as the Tatler had been." Such are the beginnings of popular knowledge. What the Tatler and Spectator were to the gentlemen of Spalding, the Penny Magazine and Chambers' Journal were to many a mechanic a hundred and twenty years after. One of this class has recorded the influence of such works, which addressed a far larger number than could be addressed at the beginning of the eighteenth century:—"The Penny Magazine was published. I borrowed the first volume, and determined to make an effort to possess myself with the second. Accordingly, with January, 1833, I determined to discontinue the use of sugar in my tea, hoping that my family would not then feel the sacrifice necessary to buy the book.... I looked as anxiously for the issue of the monthly part as I did for the means of getting a living."[27] It is this spirit in the great mechanical class of this country that, in spite of some popular reading that is corrupting, and much that is frivolous, will ultimately raise and purify even the meanest sheet of our cheap literature, and compel those who have the responsibility of addressing large masses of the people to understand that an influential portion do feel that the acquirement of knowledge is worth some sacrifice. The 'Complete Catalogue of Modern Books, published from the beginning of the century to 1756,' contains 5280 new works. In this Catalogue "all pamphlets and other tracts" are excluded. We can scarcely, therefore, compare this period, as to the number of books published, with that of 1680. The average number of the first 57 years of the 18th century was 93 new works each year. At the beginning of the century, the price of a folio or quarto volume ranged from 10s. to 12s.; an octavo from 5s. to 6s.; and a duodecimo from 2s. 6d. to 3s. We have the original 'Tatler' before us, with its curious advertisements of books, sales by the candle, cordial elixirs, lotteries, and bohea tea at 24s. a-pound. Whitelocke's 'Memorials,' folio, is advertised at 12s.; Rowe's edition of Shakspeare, 8vo., is 5s. per volume; 'The Peerage of England,' 8vo., 6s.; Shakspeare's Poems, 12mo., 1s. 6d.; 'The Monthly Amusement,' each number containing a complete novel, is 1s.; Sermons are 2d. each. We learn, from other sources, that the first edition of 'The Dunciad' was a sixpenny pamphlet; whilst 'The Governor of Cyprus, a Novel,' and 'The Wanton Fryar, a Novel,' were each 12s. The number printed of an edition was, no doubt, very moderate, except chiefly of books that were associated with some great popular excitement. Sacheverell's Trial is said to have sold 30,000; as, in a later period, 30,000 were sold of Burke's 'Reflections on the Revolution in France.' The old booksellers were cautious about works of imagination when they were expected to pay handsomely for copyright. The manuscript of 'Robinson Crusoe' was pronounced dangerous by the whole tribe of publishers, till one ventured upon an edition. The demand was such that the copies could only be supplied by dividing the work amongst several printers. One of Defoe's numerous assailants, in attempting to ridicule him, gives the best evidence of his popularity: "There is not an old woman that can go to the price of it but buys 'The Life and Adventures,' and leaves it as a legacy with the 'Pilgrim's Progress.'" Richardson's 'Pamela,' published in 1741, sold five editions in one year. There are fabulous accounts of Millar, the publisher, clearing 18,000l. by 'Tom Jones.' In those times the Dublin pirates were as assiduous in their plunder of English copyrights as the American publishers have been in plundering the English, and the English the American, in our days. Richardson was driven wild by the publication of half 'Sir Charles Grandison' in Ireland, in a cheap form, before a single volume was issued in England. There was a regular system of bribery in the English printing-offices, through which the Dublin booksellers organised their robberies. They sold their books surreptitiously in England and Scotland; and from their greater cheapness they had the command of their own market. This system lasted till the Union. The prices of books do not appear to have much increased at the beginning of the reign of George III. In some cases their moderation is remarkable. We have seen how small was the demand for the first volume of Hume's 'History' in 1754. We have a number of 'The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser' at hand, May 9, 1764; and there we learn, from an advertisement, what a change ten years had produced. A new edition of the third and fourth volumes, in quarto, is advertised at 1l. 5s.; but "the proprietor, at the desire of many who wish to be possessed of this valuable and esteemed history, is induced to a monthly publication, which will not exceed eight volumes." These volumes were 5s. each. It is manifest that the bookseller had found a new class to address when he issued the monthly volumes. Hume says, "Notwithstanding the variety of winds and seasons to which my writings had been exposed, they had still been making such advances that the copy-money given me by the booksellers much exceeded anything formerly known in England." He had complained of the neglect of the "considerable for rank or letters." His publisher saw that a history with such charms of style—so freed from tedious quotations from state-papers and statutes—so unlike the great folios of Carte and Rapin—was a book for a new race of readers. Coleridge humorously enough says—"Poets and philosophers, rendered diffident by their very number, addressed themselves to 'learned readers;' then, aimed to conciliate the graces of 'the candid reader;' till, the critic still rising as the author sank, the amateurs of literature collectively were erected into a municipality of judges, and addressed as 'the Town.' And now, finally, all men being supposed to read, and all readers able to judge, the multitudinous 'Public,' shaped into personal unity by the magic of abstraction, sits nominal despot on the throne of criticism."[28] There is a great truth beneath the sarcasm. The enduring patronage of the public was beginning when Andrew Millar was bold enough to publish Hume's History in monthly five-shilling volumes. But there are still many evidences that the commerce of books at that period, and subsequently, did not contemplate the existence of a large class of buyers, beyond those who were at ease in their fortunes. In that farrago of sense and absurdity, 'The Life of James Lackington, the present Bookseller, Finsbury-square, London, written by himself' (1791), there is a remarkable disclosure of the mode in which books were prevented being sold cheaply, after the original demand had been satisfied:—"When first invited to these trade-sales, I was very much surprised to learn that it was common for such as purchased remainders to destroy one-half or three-fourths of such books, and to charge the full publication price, or nearly that, for such as they kept on hand. And there was a kind of standing order amongst the trade that, in case any one was known to sell articles under the publication price, such a person was to be excluded from trade-sales—so blind were copyright holders to their own interest." In the same manner, it is within the memory of many living persons that there was an invariable high price for fish in London, because the wholesale dealers at Billingsgate always destroyed a portion of what came to market, if the supply were above the average. The dealers in fish had not recognised the existence of a class who would buy for their suppers what the rich had not taken for their dinners; and knew not that the stalls of Tottenham Court Road had as many customers ready for a low price as the shops of Charing Cross for a high price. The fishmongers had not discovered that the price charged to the evening customers had no effect of lowering that of the morning. Nor had the booksellers discovered that there were essentially two, if not more, classes of customers for books—those who would have the dearest and the newest, and those who were content to wait till the gloss of novelty had passed off, and good works became accessible to them, either in cheaper reprints, or "remainders" reduced in price. But books and fish have one material difference. Good books are not impaired in value when they are cheapened. Their character, which has been established by the first demand, creates a second and a larger demand. Lackington destroyed no books that were worth saving, but sold them as he best could. We have no quarrel with his self-commendation when he says, "I could almost be vain enough to assert that I have thereby been highly instrumental in diffusing that general desire for reading now so prevalent among the inferior orders of society." What Lackington thought "a general desire for reading" was, nevertheless, a very limited desire. "The inferior orders of society" who had the desire did not comprehend many of the mechanics, and none of the husbandry labourers. It may be doubted whether the Magazine Literature that the eighteenth century called forth ever went beyond the gentry and the superior traders. Kippis says of the magazines, "they have been the means of diffusing a general habit of reading through the nation." There appears to have been a sort of tacit agreement amongst all who spoke of public enlightenment in the days of George III. to put out of view the great body of "the nation" who paid for their bread by their weekly wages. The magazines were certainly never addressed to this class. But for the general book-buyers of the time, Cave's project of 'The Gentleman's Magazine' was a great step in popular literature. The booksellers would not join him in what they held to be a risk. When he had succeeded, and sold 10,000, then they set up the rival 'London Magazine.' Cave threw all his energy into the magazine, and was rewarded. "He scarcely ever looked out of the window, but with a view to its improvement," said Johnson. 'The Gentleman's Magazine' commenced in 1731. Then came, year after year, magazines "as plenty as blackberries:"—'The London,' 'The Universal,' 'The Literary,' 'The Royal,' 'The Complete,' 'The Town and Country,' 'The Ladies',' 'The Westminster,' 'The European,' 'The Monthly.' The first popular review, 'The Monthly,' was published in 1749, and 'The Critical' in 1756. The public were now firmly established as the real patrons of letters. There was an end of poor authors knocking at great men's doors with a bundle of books. There was an end to paid Dedications and gratulatory Odes. Johnson could afford to launch his Dictionary without the help of the Earl of Chesterfield. Hume became "not only independent but opulent" through the "copy-money" of the booksellers. The publication of Collections of the Poets was another proof of the extension of the reading public. The man who first projected such a Collection went for cheapness. In 1777 John Bell announced an edition of 'The Poets of Great Britain; complete from Chaucer to Churchill.' The London booksellers, to the number of forty, held a meeting, to resist what they considered an invasion of their literary property—some works within the time of the statute of Anne being legally theirs—others their copyright by courtesy. They resolved to combine their various interests; and they produced that edition of the Poets, in 68 volumes, which is called Johnson's, though, according to Malone, he never saw a line of the text. The 'Lives,' which Johnson wrote for two hundred guineas, will endure as a great classic work, however deformed by hasty or prejudiced judgment. Many of the Poets given in the series have no pretension to be looked upon again, except as a part of literary history, which may show how the most feeble may attain reputation in an age of mediocrity. The booksellers spoke contemptuously of Bell's edition, which they called "trifling." They boasted their superior printing; but they gave no place in their Collection to Chaucer, Spenser, or Donne, as Bell had done. They did not care to direct the public taste;—they printed what they thought would sell. The demand for such Collections has always been one of the proofs of a healthy condition of public intelligence; but the want has not often been supplied with any judgment beyond that of the rude commercial estimate of the prevailing fashion in poetry. It is extremely difficult to deal with such matters. All literary students have a proper horror of abridgments and analyses. They want all of an author, or none. You can neither make Chaucer extremely popular by an entire reprint, nor command a large sale by partial extract. But John Bell was right, in 1777, to risk the printing of three great early poets, whilst the booksellers began with Waller. Here were poets that can never be wholly obsolete. But the rubbish called poetry that found its way, by trade preferences, into Johnson's edition—the inanities of the drivellers between Pope and Gray—let not these be reproduced in our time, when such Collections are coming again into fashion, and showing, as they showed before, an extension of readers. The Circulating Library—what a revolution was that in popular literature! How this new plant appeared above the earth, where it first budded, where it bore its early fruit—how it grew into a great tree, like that in the old title to Lilly's Grammar, where the apples of knowledge are being gathered by little climbing-boys—would be difficult to trace and to record. There it was—this great economiser of individual outlay for books—in most market-towns at the beginning of the century. The universal adoption of the name is the best proof of the common recognition of the idea. It changed the habits of the old country booksellers. It found them other occupation than keeping a stall in the market-place, as did their worthy forefathers. They dealt no longer in tracts and single sermons. It sent the chap-books into the villages. It made the 'Seven Champions of Christendom' and 'The Wise Masters of Greece' vulgar. It created a new literature of fiction. It banished 'Robinson Crusoe' to the kitchen, and 'The Arabian Nights' to the nursery. It built up great printing-houses in Leadenhall-street; and held out high rewards for rapid composition, at the rate of five pounds per volume, to decayed governesses who had seen the world, and bank-clerks of an imaginative turn of mind. These could produce a wilderness of Italian bandits, with unlimited wealth and beauty, who had won the hearts of credulous countesses, and only surrendered to the hangman when whole armies came out to take them. These could unveil all the mysterious luxuries of great mansions in Grosvenor-square, or of sumptuous hotels in Bond-street. There was ever and anon a "bright particular star" in the Milky Way of popular fiction. But the circulating library went on its own course, whether the empyrean of romance were dim or brilliant. "What have you got new?" was the universal question put to the guardian of the treasures of this recently-discovered world of letters. When the bower-maid of the luxurious fair one, who lolled upon the sofa through a long summer's day, as Gray did when he was deep in CrÉbillon, came to "change" the book, great sometimes was the perplexity. It was not a difficult task to "change," but the newness was puzzling. The lady and the neat-handed Phillis pursued their studies simultaneously. They did not like "poetry;" they did not like "letters." 'Sir Charles Grandison' was as old and as tiresome as 'Pamela.' 'Tom Jones,' and 'Peregrine Pickle;' they wondered why they were allowed to remain in the catalogue. They had read 'Coelebs in search of a Wife'—the charming book—but they did not want it again. Perhaps, suggested the bookseller's apprentice, 'The Monk' might do once more. And so the circulating library went on, slow and struggling, till, about 1814, the unlucky desire for "something new" brought down to the little greasy collection, whose delusive numbers of volumes ranged from 1 to 3250, a new novel, with the somewhat unpromising title of 'Waverley, or 'tis Sixty Years since.' At first, the lady upon the sofa, and the counsellor of her studies, could not endure it, for it was full of horrid Scotch. It was often "at home," as the phrase went, for six months of its probation; when, somehow, it was discovered that a new book of wonderful talent had come out of the North. Another and another came, and in a few years the old circulating library was ruined. The Burneys, and Edgeworths, and Radcliffes, and Godwins, and Holcrofts, who had mixed with much lower company upon the librarian's shelves, still held a place. But the Winters in London and Winters in Bath, the Midnight Bells, the Nuns, and the Watch-Towers, retired from business. There was then a new epoch in the circulating-library life. The literature of travels and memoirs timidly claimed a place by the side of the fashionable novel, which asserted its dignity by raising its price to a guinea and a half. The old legitimate stupidity, which did very well before the trade was disturbed, would no longer "circulate." But the names of the producers of the higher fiction were not "Legion." "Something new" must still be had. To meet the market, every variety of west-end authorship was experimented upon. The number to be printed could be calculated with tolerable exactness, according to the reputation of the writer,—and this calculation regulated the payment of copyright, from fifty pounds, and five hundred printed, to the man without a name, up to fifteen hundred pounds, and an impression of three thousand, to "the glass of fashion." But in this department of the commerce of literature,—as it will be in the end with every branch upon which the growth of popular intelligence is operating,—the rubbish is perishable, has perished; the good endureth. The circulating library is now, in many instances, a real instrument of popular enlightenment. Yet in some of the smaller towns, and in watering-places where raffles have their charm, and a musical performance is patronised in the 'Fancy Repository,' by "audience fit though few"—there the circulating library may be studied in its ancient brilliancy. There, are still preserved, with a paper number on their brown leather backs, and a well-worn bill of the terms of subscription on their sides, those volumes, now fading into oblivion, whence the writers of many a penny journal of fiction are drawing and will still draw their inspiration. Many of these relics of a past age will live over again in shilling volumes with new titles. The heroes and heroines will change their names; the furniture of the apartments in which they utter their vows of love will be modernised; every sentence which in the slightest degree approaches the vulgar will be softened down or obliterated. There is a great deal yet to be done in this way; and the metamorphosis will go on and prosper. In the mean while the circulating libraries, both in London and the provinces, are supporting a higher literature of fiction than those of the past generation; and they find also that there are other volumes almost as attractive as the last new novel. They are doing the same work as the book-clubs. Both these modes of co-operation have had the effect of making the demand for a book that is at once solid and attractive more certain than the old demand by individual purchasers. The certainty of the demand necessarily produces a gradual reduction of price. An average demand is created, resulting from an average of taste in those who belong to book-societies and subscribe to circulating libraries. But these channels for the sale of new books are not materially influenced by lowness of price. Cheapness is greatly influential with the private purchaser; but very many are content with the reading of a new book, through the club or the library, who would never buy it for their own household. This first demand is one of the means by which good books may be cheapened for a subsequent large issue for the permanent home library. In 'The Life of Lackington' there is the following passage:—"I have been informed that, when circulating libraries were first opened, the booksellers were much alarmed; and their rapid increase added to their fears, and led them to think that the sale of books would be much diminished by such libraries. But experience has proved that the sale of books, so far from being diminished by them, has been greatly promoted; as from these repositories many thousand families have been cheaply supplied with books, by which the taste of reading has become much more general, and thousands of books are purchased every year by such as have first borrowed them at those libraries, and, after reading, approving of them, have become purchasers." One of the first attempts, and it was a successful one, to establish a cheap Book-Club was made by Robert Burns. He had founded a Society at Tarbolton, called the Bachelors' Club, which met monthly for the purposes of discussion and conversation. But this was a club without books; for the fines levied upon the members were spent in conviviality. Having changed his residence to Mauchline, a similar club was established there, but with one important alteration:—the fines were set apart for the purchase of books, and the first work bought was 'The Mirror,' by Henry Mackenzie. Dr. Currie, the biographer of Burns, in recording this fact, says, "With deference to the Conversation Society of Mauchline, it may be doubted whether the books which they purchased were of a kind best adapted to promote the interest and happiness of persons in this situation of life." The objection of Dr. Currie was founded upon his belief that works which cultivated "delicacy of taste" were unfitted for those who pursued manual occupations. He qualifies his objection, however, by the remark, that "Every human being is a proper judge of his own happiness, and within the path of innocence ought to be permitted to pursue it. Since it is the taste of the Scottish peasantry to give a preference to works of taste and of fancy, it may be presumed they find a superior gratification in the perusal of such works." This truth, timidly put by Dr. Currie, ought to be the foundation of every attempt to provide books for all readers. We are learning to correct the false opinions which, for a century or two, have been degrading the national character by lowering the general taste. Those who maintained that taste was the exclusive property of the rich and the luxurious, could not take away from the humble the beauty of the rose or the fragrance of the violet; they could not make the nightingale sing a vulgar note to "the swink'd hedger at his supper;" nor, speaking purely to a question of taste, did they venture to lower the noble translation of the Bible, which they put into the hands of the poor man, to something which, according to the insolent formula of those days, was "adapted to the meanest capacity." A great deal of this has passed away. It has been discovered that music is a fitting thing to be cultivated by the people; the doors of galleries are thrown open for the people to gaze upon Raffaelles and Correggios; even cottages are built so as to satisfy a feeling of proportion, and to make their inmates aspire to something like decoration. All this is progress in the right direction. In the year 1825 Lord Brougham (then Mr. Brougham), in his 'Practical Observations upon the Education of the People,' explained a plan which has yet been only partially acted upon. "Book-Clubs or Reading Societies may be established by very small numbers of contributors, and require an inconsiderable fund. If the associates live near one another, arrangements may be easily made for circulating the books, so that they may be in use every moment that any one can spare from his work. Here, too, the rich have an opportunity presented to them of promoting instruction without constant interference: the gift of a few books, as a beginning, will generally prove a sufficient encouragement to carry on the plan by weekly or monthly contributions: and, with the gift, a scheme may be communicated to assist the contributors in arranging the plan of their association." Simple in its working as such a plan would appear to be, the instances of these voluntary associations are really few. In Scotland, Lending Libraries and Itinerating Libraries have, in some districts, been established successfully; but in England, Lending Libraries are scarcely to be found, except in connexion with schools, or under the immediate direction of the minister of a parish or of a dissenting congregation. In these cases, we fear, comes too frequently into action the desire, laudable no doubt, to promote "the interest and happiness of persons in this situation of life." They are not permitted to choose for themselves. The best books of amusement are kept out of their sight; and they contrive to get hold of the worst. The timidity which insists upon supplying these libraries with pattern books renders the libraries disagreeable, and therefore useless.[29] 'Autobiography of an Artisan.' By Christopher Thomson. 1847. 'Biographia Literaria,' vol. i. p. 60, ed. 1817. See page 309. CHAPTER IV. Continued dearness of Books—Useful Knowledge Society—Modern Epoch of Cheapness—Demand and Supply—The Printing-machine—The Paper-machine—Revival of Woodcutting. From the time when Hume's 'History' was published at 5s. a volume, there appears to have been a steady advance in the price of books to the end of the century. In the eleven years from 1792 to 1802, there was an average publication of 372 new books per year. The number of new books had quadrupled upon the average of those published from 1701 to 1756. But the duodecimo had been increased in price from 2s. 6d. to 4s.; the octavo from 5s. or 6s. to 10s.; the quarto from 12s. to 1l. 1s. From 1800 to 1827 there were published, according to the London Catalogue, 19,860 books, including reprints; for which reprints deducting one-fifth, there were 15,888 new books, being an annual average of 588. Books were still rising in price. The duodecimo mounted up to 6s., or became a small octavo at 10s. 6d.; the octavo was raised from 10s. to 12s.. or 14s.; the quarto was very frequently two guineas. Some of this rise of price was unquestionably due to the general rise in the value of labour, and to the higher price of paper. But more is to be ascribed to the determination of the great publishers not sufficiently to open their eyes to the extension of the number of readers, and the absolute certainty, therefore, that a system of extravagantly high prices was an unnatural, bigoted, and unprofitable system. They paid most liberally for copyright, and they looked only to an exclusive sale for their remuneration. They did not apply the same system to periodical works. The two great Reviews, the 'Edinburgh' and the 'Quarterly,' were as cheap, if not cheaper, having regard to their literary merit, than the cheapest books of the previous century. They were certain of their profit through that union of excellence and cheapness which could not fail to create a large demand. The publishers generally had not the same reliance upon the increase of readers of other popular works of original excellence. It has only been within the last twenty years that their unalloyed confidence in a narrow market has been first shaken, and then overthrown. In looking back upon the changes of a quarter of a century, it is impossible, even for the writer, who was identified with this great movement in Popular Literature, to forbear speaking of what was accomplished by 'The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.' One who has written contemporary history in a broad and liberal spirit says—"The institution of this Society was an important feature of its times, and one of the honours belonging to the reign of George IV. It did not succeed in all its professed objects: it did not give to the operative classes of Great Britain a library of the elements of all sciences—it omitted some of the most important of the sciences, and, with regard to some others, presented anything rather than the elements. It did not fully penetrate the masses that most needed aid. But it established the principle and precedent of cheap publication (cheapness including goodness), stimulated the demand for sound information, and the power and inclination to supply that demand; and marked a great Æra in the history of popular enlightenment."[30] The Society originated with Mr. Brougham, in 1826. He gathered around him some of the leading statesmen, lawyers, and philanthropists of his day. Men eminent in letters and in science joined the association. And yet its success was so doubtful in the eyes of those who had been accustomed to consider high price as a necessary condition of excellence, that one of the greatest publishing houses refused to bring out the treatises without a guarantee. The Society wisely went upon the principle, originally, of leaving all the trade arrangements to its publishers. It placed its 'Library of Useful Knowledge,' its 'Farmer's Series,' its 'Maps,' in the hands of Messrs. Baldwin, paying the literary and artistical expenses, and receiving a rent upon the copies sold. Mr. Knight originated the 'British Almanac' and its 'Companion,' 'The Library of Entertaining Knowledge,' 'The Penny Magazine,' and 'The Penny CyclopÆdia;' and he bore the entire expense and risk of these works, as he did also for 'The Gallery of Portraits,' and 'The Journal of Education,' paying upon all a rent when the sale reached a certain number of copies.[31] It is sufficient to mention these facts to show that the operations connected with this Society were not upon an insignificant scale, or not fruitful of large results; and that they were essentially commercial operations. The cry that was raised against this Society, by those who were interested in the publication of dear books, was that of "monopoly." That cuckoo cry was repeated on every side. Fashionable publishers shouted it; the old conventional school of authors echoed it. Those who wrote for the Society were called, in derision, "compilers." Scribblers who never verified a quotation ridiculed patient industry as dulness. From the time when the Society commenced a real "superintendence" of works for the people—when it assisted, by diligent revision and friendly inquiry, the services of its editors—the old vague generalities of popular knowledge were exploded; and the scissars-and-paste school of authorship had to seek for other occupations than Paternoster-row could once furnish. Accuracy was forced upon elementary books as the rule and not the exception. Books professedly "entertaining" were to be founded upon exact information, and their authorities invariably indicated. No doubt this superintendence in some degree interfered with the free course of original composition, and imparted somewhat of the utilitarian character to everything produced. But it was the only course by which a new aspect could be given to cheap literature, by showing that the great principles of excellence were common to all books, whether for the learned or the uninformed. In seventeen years the Society accomplished its main objects. There were considerable gains connected with it, and there were great losses. These are evanescent. The good which it did remains. It supplied the new demand for knowledge in a way that had never before been contemplated; it supplied it at the cheapest rate then possible; it broke down the distinctions between knowledge for the few and knowledge for the many; it created a popular taste for art; it sent its light into the strongholds of ignorance and superstition, by superseding, for a time, a large amount of weekly trash, and destroying, for ever, the astrological and indecent almanacs. But, beyond its own productions, it raised the standard of all popular literature. It has had worthy co-labourers and successors. It ceased its work when others were in the field, honestly and successfully carrying forward what it had begun. He who writes this will ever think it an honour that he long worked in fellowship with Henry Brougham; and that he was a partaker, for some years, in the councils of an association of men more or less eminent, whose objects were never of a selfish, partial, or temporary nature. He has sate at those councils with five cabinet ministers, who felt most deeply that the education of the people, in its largest sense, was as much their business as the imposition of taxes. Where is that spirit now? The modern epoch of cheap literature may be held to have commenced, however partially, in 1827, when Constable issued his 'Miscellany,' and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge their 'Library of Useful Knowledge.' In a few years followed 'The Library of Entertaining Knowledge,' Mr. Murray's 'Family Library,' and Lardner's 'Cabinet CyclopÆdia.' These books were properly published under a tentative system. Not one of them rushed to that extreme cheapness which is indicated by quantity alone. They each had to feel their way to a demand proportioned to the expense of their production. That production was necessarily expensive. The cheapness consisted in the employment of the best writers to produce books of original merit at a price that was essentially low, by comparison with the ordinary rate at which books for the few were sold. Though Constable, in his grand style, talked of millions of buyers, he charged his little volumes 3s. 6d. each. He was right. The millions were not ready to buy such books at a shilling, nor even at sixpence. They are not ready now. 'The Library of Useful Knowledge' was charged at the rate of 3d. a sheet. Taking mere quantity of paper and printing into account, some of the penny journals of the present day are six times as cheap. 'The Library of Entertaining Knowledge' was 4s. 6d. a volume. The copyright of each volume ordinarily cost 200l., and the woodcuts as much, and even more. 'The Family Library,' at 5s., was, no doubt, equally costly. The same costliness applies to Lardner's 'CyclopÆdia,' published at 6s. In these new undertakings, conceived in a totally different spirit from anything which had preceded them, there were large expenses which have been surprisingly reduced by scientific discovery and extended competition at the present day. There were about twenty woodcutters in London in 1827, who were real artists, paid at artists' prices. Woodcutting is now a manufacture. Paper, then, paid the high rate of duty, and was 50 per cent. dearer. Steam-printing was not universal, and was only applied to common works. Each of these series was offered to the very numerous body of those who, having become better educated than the same classes in a previous generation, were desirous of real improvement. They had a certain success, but a variable one. Every experiment of this sort has shown that such collections of separate and independent works cannot rely upon a sale as a series. They come to be bought, each work by itself, according to its attractions for individual purchasers. Thence all those irregularities of sale, and consequent accumulations of stock, which press heavily upon the profits of those volumes which are successful. The republication of the 'Waverley Novels' in 5s. volumes was an exception to this rule. They constituted an integral work. Their sale was vast, although the total cost was 12l. Scott and his publisher saw the immense field that was before them, in giving their books to the world at a price that would carry them into thousands of households, instead of limiting them to the circulating libraries. They originally appeared in seventy-four volumes, at an aggregate cost of 34l. 10s. Had they remained in their original form, and at their first price, those heroic efforts which lifted a mountain of debt off the shoulders of that great man who, perhaps, more than all men, might have claimed the motto which Burke said should be his—"Nitor in adversum"—those labours which wore him out, would not have been successful. Neither would the success have come so soon had the later publication in twenty-five volumes for 5l. been tried in the first instance. If the 'Waverley Novels' go through new phases of cheapness, it will be because there is now a larger public to buy; and because the first natural price for all works of extraordinary merit, that of authorship, has been already paid largely and liberally. The question of price is then mainly reduced to a question of paper and print. But miserable would it be for a nation whose "chiefest glory is its authors," at a time when the nature of that glory is properly understood, if a passion for premature cheapness, to be measured by mere quantity, were to possess the minds of the people, and to be the expression of the "Vox populi." There was a much larger public always ready to purchase these enchanting fictions than have been, at any time during the last quarter of a century, ready for the purchase of books of information, however agreeably presented. We doubt whether the Family Libraries, and the Libraries of Entertaining Knowledge, and the Cabinet CyclopÆdias, would have sold better at the time of their publication, if they had been produced at half the original price. The experiment was tried, when the number of readers was largely increased, in 'Knight's Weekly Volume'—a series published at one-third the price of Constable's 'Miscellany.' The majority of books in that series were, for the most part, of intrinsic merit; many also carrying the recommendation of popular names as their authors. "Why Mr. Knight did not profit largely by the speculation is a problem yet to be solved," says the writer of a recent paper on 'Literature for the People.' The solution is, that the people did not sufficiently buy them. So far from twenty thousand copies being sold of many volumes, as asserted, there were not twenty volumes, out of the hundred and forty, that reached a sale of ten thousand, and the average sale was scarcely five thousand. They were not cheap enough for the humble, who looked to mere quantity. They were too cheap for the genteel, who were then taught to think that a cheap book must necessarily be a bad book. It is impossible not to remember that, even ten years ago, the majority of publishers, and many of their supporters in the public journals, hated cheap books. The 'Weekly Volumes' were welcomed very generally by those who were anxious for the enlightenment of the people. Societies were set on foot for their circulation. But all experience has shown that no associations for recommending books, and forcing their sale, can be successful. The people, of every grade, will choose for themselves. It is useless to urge an adult, whether male or female, to buy a solid book when an exciting one is longed for. It is worse than useless to give books of improvement away to the poor. They always suspect the motive. Very wisely did a witness before the "Select Committee on Newspaper Stamps," 1851, say, "There are classes which you cannot reach, unless you go to them with something which is the nearest thing to what they want." If they want fiction, they will not look at science or history. At the time of the issue of 'The Weekly Volume,' the sale of books at railway stations was unknown; and if it had been known, they scarcely presented sufficient attractions for the travelling readers for amusement. They were published also in too quick succession. It was a plausible theory of the editor, that, if good books, extremely cheap, were issued rapidly enough to form a little library, many such libraries would be formed. Those who have to deal with 'Literature for the People' must bear in mind that time as well as money has to be economised by those who of necessity must labour hard either by hand or head. What may be called furniture books may be bought by the luxurious, to put upon their shelves, and looked at when wanted. The earnest workers buy few books that they are not desirous to read, and to read at once. They bought such a book in 1830, to the extent of 50,000 copies. 'The Results of Machinery,' written by the author of this volume, was addressed to great human interests. It was not professedly amusing; but it was the first attempt to take Political Economy out of its hard and logical track. It is now recorded, as a wonderful instance of the application of cheapness to a dry subject, that Mr. M'Culloch's 'Essay on the Rate of Wages,' is republished at a shilling. It is in no spirit of self-laudation that we presume to think that the vaunted cheapness of 1854 had some previous examples. In this principle, that the great mass of the people will read as they buy, lies the secret of the enormous success of the weekly sheets of that great epoch of cheapness which began about twenty years ago. It is the principle which is the foundation of the extensive demand, growing year by year, for all periodical literature. It made the essayists. It made the magazines. It made the newspapers. It caused a sale of three hundred thousand weekly sheets in 1834. It is causing a sale of fourteen hundred thousand weekly sheets in 1854. Before we proceed in the examination of this remarkable epoch of popular literature, let us glance at the influence of mechanical and scientific improvement on the cheapening of books during the last thirty or forty years. Those who have followed us in our notices of the early history of printing will scarcely have failed to see how the ordinary laws of demand and supply have regulated the progress of this art, whose productions might, at first sight, appear to form an exception to other productions required by the necessities of mankind. There can be little doubt, we think, that when several ingenious men were, at the same moment, applying their skill to the discovery or perfection of a rapid mode of multiplying copies of books, there was a demand for books which could not well be supplied by the existing process of writing. That demand had doubtless been created by the anxiety to think for themselves which had sprung up amongst the laity of Catholic Europe. There was a very general desire amongst the wealthier classes to obtain a knowledge of the principles of their religion from the fountain-head,—the Bible. The desire could not be gratified except at an enormous cost. Printing was at last discovered; and Bibles were produced without limitation of number. The instant, therefore, that the demand for Bibles could be supplied, the supply acted upon the demand, by increasing it in every direction; and when it was found that not only Bibles but many other books of real value, such as copies of the ancient classics, could be produced with a facility equal to the wants of every purchaser, books at once became a large branch of commerce, and the presses of the first printers never lacked employment. The purchasers of books, however, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were almost wholly confined to the class of nobles and those of the richer citizens and scholars by profession. It was a very long time before the influence of the press had produced any direct effect upon the habits of the great mass of the people. It was not till the system of periodical literature was fairly established, and that newspapers first, and magazines and reviews subsequently, had taken hold of the popular mind, that the productions of the press could be said to be in demand amongst the people generally. Up to our own times that demand has been limited to very narrow bounds; and the circumstances by which it has been extended are as remarkable as those which accompanied the progress of the original invention of printing. The same principle of demand going before supply, and the same reaction of supply upon demand, will be found to have marked the operations of the printing-press in this country, during the last twenty-five years, as distinctly as they marked them throughout Europe in the latter part of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth. We will shortly recapitulate these circumstances. A few years after the commencement of the present century, a system of education, which is now known throughout Europe as that of mutual instruction, was introduced into this country. In whatever mode this system was called into action, its first experiments soon demonstrated that, through it, education might be bestowed at a much cheaper rate than had ever before been considered practicable. This success encouraged the friends of education to exertions quite unexampled; and the British and Foreign School Society, and the National Society, had, in a very few years, taught some thousands of children to read and write, who, without the new arrangements which had been brought into practice, would in great part have remained completely untaught. A demand for books of a new class was thus preparing on every side. The demand would not be very sudden or very urgent; but it would still exist, and would become stronger and stronger till a supply was in some degree provided for it It would act, too, indirectly but surely, upon that portion of society whose demand for knowledge had already been in part supplied. The principle of educating the humblest in the scale of society would necessarily give an impulse to the education of the class immediately above them. The impulse would indeed be least felt by the large establishments for education at the other end of the scale; and thus, whilst the children of the peasant and the tradesman would learn many valuable lessons through the influence of a desire for knowledge for its own sake, and of love for their instructors, many of the boys of our great public schools would long remain acquiring only a knowledge of words and not of things, and influenced chiefly by a degrading fear of brutal punishment. The demand for knowledge thus created, and daily gathering strength amongst the bulk of the people, could not be adequately supplied forty years ago by the mechanical inventions then employed in the art of printing. Exactly in the same way as the demand for knowledge which began to agitate men's minds about the middle of the fifteenth century produced the invention of printing, so the great extension of the demand in England, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, produced those mechanical improvements which have created a new Æra in the typographical art. These improvements consist in the process of stereotyping, and in the printing-machine, as distinguished from the printing-press. As several approaches had been made before the time of Faust to the principle of printing books from moveable types, so the principle of producing impressions from a cylinder, and of inking the types by a roller, which are the great principles of the printing-machine, had been discovered in this country as early as the year 1790. In that year Mr. William Nicholson took out a patent for certain improvements in printing, the specification of which clearly shows that to him belongs the first suggestion of printing from cylinders. But this inventor, like many other ingenious men, was led astray by a part of his project, which was highly difficult, if not impracticable, to the neglect of that portion of his plan which, since his time, has been brought into the most perfect operation. Nicholson's patent was never acted upon. The first maker of a printing-machine was Mr. Koenig, a native of Saxony; and the first sheet of paper printed by cylinders, and by steam, was the 'Times' newspaper of the 28th November, 1814. The machine thus for the first time brought into action was that of Mr. Koenig. It has been superseded by machines of improved construction. Let us imagine a state of things in which the demand for works of large numbers should have gone on increasing, while the mechanical means of supplying that demand had remained stationary—had remained as they were at the beginning of the present century. Before the invention of stereotyping it was necessary to print off considerable impressions of the few books in general demand, such as bibles and prayer-books, that the cost of composition might be so far divided as to allow the book to be sold cheap: with several school-books, also, it was not uncommon to go to press with an edition of 10,000 copies. Two men, working eight hours a-day each, would produce 1000 perfect impressions (impressions on each side) of a sheet per day; and thus, if a book consisted of twenty sheets (the size of an ordinary school-book), one press would produce the twenty sheets in 200 days. If a printer, therefore, were engaged in the production of such a school-book, who could only devote one press to the operation, it would require very nearly three-quarters of a year to complete 10,000 copies of that work. It is thus evident, that if the work were to be published on a given day, it must begin to be printed at least three-quarters of a year before it could be published; and that there must be a considerable outlay of capital in paper and in printing for a long time before any return could be expected. This advance of capital would have a necessary influence on the price of the book, in addition to the difference of the cost of working by hand as compared with working by machinery; and there probably the inconvenience of the tedious progress we have described would stop. But take a case which would allow no time for this long preparation. Take a daily newspaper, for instance, of which great part of the news must be collected, and written, and printed within twenty-four hours; calling into operation reporters at home, correspondents abroad, expresses, electric telegraphs. Formerly, the number printed of the most popular daily paper would be limited to five thousand; and this number could not be produced in time without the most perfect division of labour aiding the most intense exertion, provided that paper were printed by hand. The 'Times' newspaper now produces forty thousand copies in less than four hours, from one set of types. If the difficulties that existed in producing any considerable number of newspapers before the invention of the printing-machine were almost insurmountable, equally striking will the advantages of that invention appear when we consider its application to the cheap weekly sheets, of which the 'Penny Magazine' was the type. Let us suppose that the education of the people had gone on uninterruptedly in the schools of mutual instruction, and that the mechanical means for supplying the demand for knowledge thus created had sustained no improvement. If the demand for knowledge had led to the establishment of the 'Penny Magazine' before the improvement of printing, it is probable that the sale of twenty thousand copies would have been considered the utmost that could have been calculated upon. One thousand perfect copies could only have been daily produced at one press by the labour of two men. The machine produces sixteen thousand copies. If the demand for a penny sheet, printed thus slowly by the press, had reached twenty thousand, it would have required two presses to produce that twenty thousand in the same time—namely, ten days—in which one hundred and sixty thousand are produced by the machine; and it would have required one press to be at work one hundred and sixty days, or sixteen presses for ten days, to effect the same results as the machine effects in ten days. But, in point of fact, such a sale could never have been reached under the old system of press-work. The hand-labour, as compared with the machine, would have added at least forty per cent. to the cost of production, even if the sixteen presses could have been set in motion. Without stereotyping for duplicates, no attempt would have been made to set them in motion; for the cost of re-engraving woodcuts, and of re-composing the types, would have put a natural commercial limit to the operation. The invention of the paper-machine was concurrent with the invention of the printing-machine. Without the paper-machine, the material of books, and newspapers, and journals, could never have been supplied with any reference to cheapness. Chemistry, too, has converted the coarsest rags, and the dirtiest cotton-wool, into fine pulp. The material of which this book is formed existed a few month ago, perhaps, in the shape of a tattered frock, whose shreds, exposed for years to the sun and wind, covered the sturdy loins of the shepherd watching his sheep on the plains of Hungary;—or it might have formed part of the coarse blue shirt of the Italian sailor, on board some little trading-vessel of the Mediterranean;—or it might have pertained to the once tidy camicia of the neat straw-plaiter of Tuscany, who, on the eve of some festival, when her head was intent upon gay things, condemned the garment to the stracci-vendolo (rag-merchant) of Leghorn;—or it might have constituted the coarse covering of the flock-bed of the farmer of Saxony, or once looked bright in the damask table-cloth of the burgher of Hamburgh;—or, lastly, it might have been swept, new and unworn, out of the vast collection of the shreds and patches, the fustian and buckram, of a London tailor; or might have accompanied every revolution of a fashionable coat in the shape of lining—having travelled from St. James's to St. Giles's, from Bond Street to Monmouth Street, from Rag Fair to the Dublin Liberty, till man disowned the vesture, and the kennel-sweeper claimed its miserable remains. In each or all of these forms, and in hundreds more which it would be useless to describe, this sheet of paper a short time since might have existed. No matter, now, what the colour of the rag—how oily the cotton—what filth it has gathered and harboured through all its transmutation—the scientific paper-maker can produce out of these filthy materials one of the most beautiful productions of manufacture. But he has a difficulty in obtaining even these coarse materials. The advance of a people in civilisation has not only a tendency to make the supply of rags abundant, but, at the same time, to increase the demand for rags. The use of machinery in manufactures renders clothing cheap; the cheapness of clothing causes its consumption to increase, not only in the proportion of an increasing population, but by the scale of individual expenditure; the stock of rags is therefore increasing in the same ratio that our looms produce more linen and cotton cloth. But then the increase of knowledge runs in a parallel line with this increase of comforts; and the increase of knowledge requires an increase of books. The principle of publishing books and tracts, to be read by thousands instead of tens and hundreds, has already caused a large addition to the demand for printing-paper. Science made paper cheap in spite of taxation. The government has worked against science to keep books dear. We cannot pass over the mechanical and other scientific improvements in typography, which preceded and accompanied the great epoch of cheapness of the last quarter of a century, without more particularly noticing the revival, for so it may be called, of the art of woodcutting. In the 'Penny Magazine' of 1836, the editor says that no expense or labour has been spared to attain every improvement of which the art of woodcutting is susceptible—that the engravings of 305 numbers have cost 12,000l. (about 40l. a number)—that many difficulties have been overcome in adapting the character of the engravings to the rapid movements of the printing-machine—and that the art, in connexion with the cheapest form of printing, has been carried further than at one time was thought to be possible. This was written in 1836. Let any one look at a common book with woodcuts, printed thirty years ago, and he will understand what difficulties had to be overcome before 'The Penny Magazine' could present successful copies of works of art. This 'Penny Magazine,' which some even now affect to sneer at, produced a revolution in popular art throughout the world. It created similar works, to which it supplied stereotype casts, in Germany, France, Holland, Livonia (in Russian and German), Bohemia (in Sclavonic), Italy, Ionian Islands (in Modern Greek), Sweden, Norway, Spanish America, the Brazils, the United States. It raised up imitators on every side, and directed the union of art and letters into new channels. It was the forerunner of 'Punch,' and of 'The Illustrated London News.' A great art-critic of 1836 proclaimed, with oracular solemnity, "As there is no royal road to mathematics, so we say, once for all, there is no Penny Magazine road to the Fine Arts—the cultivation of the Fine Arts must be carried on by a comparatively small and gifted few, under the patronage of men of wealth and leisure." Many eminent designers—amongst whom are the honoured names of Harvey, Cruikshank, Doyle, Leech, Tenniel, Anelay, Gilbert—have gone the "Penny Magazine road," and found it quite as sure a highway to distinction, and far more pleasant, than the old by-way of patronage, so weary to the gifted few. It is wonderful how long and how tenaciously, both in literature and art, men clung to that idol Patronage. They are gone—the Chesterfields who kept Johnson seven years waiting in outward rooms,—and the Mansfields who grudged Wilkie thirty guineas for 'The Village Politicians:'— "Peor and BaÄlim Forsake their temples dim." CHAPTER V. London Catalogue, 1816-1851—Annual Catalogues, 1828-1853—Classes of Books, 1816-1861—Periodicals, 1831, 1853—Aggregate amount of Book-trade—Collections and Libraries—International Copyright—Readers in the United States—Irish National School-books. 'The London Catalogue of Books published in Great Britain, 1816 to 1851,' furnishes, in its alphabetical list, with "sizes, prices, and publishers' names," that insight into the character and extent of the literature of a generation which we cannot derive from any other source. We have already given some of the calculations of past periods. Let us endeavour to trace what the commerce of books has been in our own time. Every book in this 'London Catalogue' occupies a single line. There are 72 lines in a page; there are 626 pages. It follows that the Catalogue contains the titles of 45,072 books. In these 36 years, then, there was an average annual publication of 1252 books. This number is more than double the average of the period from 1800 to 1827. There is also published, by the proprietor of 'The London Catalogue,' an Annual Catalogue of New Books. From two of these catalogues we derive the following comparative results for the beginning and the end of a quarter of a century:— | 1828. | New publications | | 842 | | 1853. | " | | 2530 | | 1828. | Total number of volumes | | 1105 | | 1853. | " | | 2934 | | 1828. | Total cost of one set of the new publications | | £668 | 10 | 0 | | 1853. | " | | £1058 | 17 | 9 | | 1828. | Average price of each new work | | 0 | 16 | 0 | | 1853. | " | | 0 | 8 | 4½ | | 1828. | Average price per volume of the new publications | | 0 | 12 | 1 | | 1853. | " | | 0 | 7 | 2½ | Such calculations are not arrived at without the labour of many hours; but the labour is not ill-bestowed by us, for they afford better data for opinion than loose talk about the number, quality, and price of books. Hence we learn, that, in 1853, there were three times as many books published as in 1828; that the comparative increase in the number of volumes was not so great, showing that of the new books more single volumes were published; that the total cost of one set of the new publications had increased by more than one-half of the former cost; that the average price of each new work had been reduced nearly one-half; and that the average price per volume had fallen about 5s. below the price of 1828. A further analysis of this Annual List shows that, of the 2530 books published in 1853, only 287 were published at a guinea and upwards; and that of these only 206 were books of general information; while 28 were law-books, and 53 of the well-accustomed dear class of guinea-and-a-half novels. Decidedly the Quarto Dynasty had died out. As a supplement to the 'London Catalogue, 1816-1851,' there is published a 'Classified Index.' Through this we are enabled to estimate in round numbers the sort of books which the people were buying, or reading, or neglecting, in these 36 years.[32] We find that they were invited to purchase in the following proportion of classes:— | Works on divinity | | 10,300 | | History and geography | | 4,900 | | Fiction | | 3,500 | | Foreign languages and school-books | | 4,000 | | Drama and poetry | | 3,400 | | Juvenile books | | 2,900 | | Medical | | 2,500 | | Biography | | 1,850 | | Law | | 1,850 | | Science.— | Zoology | 550 | | | " | Botany | 700 | | | " | Chemistry | 170 | | | " | Geology | 280 | | | " | Mathematics | 350 | | | " | Astronomy | 150 | | | " | Natural philosophy | 300 | 2,450 | | Arts,&c.— | Antiquities | 350 | | | " | Architecture | 500 | | | " | Fine arts | 450 | | | " | Games and sports | 300 | | | " | Illustrated works | 500 | | | " | Music | 220 | | | " | Genealogy and heraldry | 140 | 2,460 | | Industry.— | Mechanics, &c. | 500 | | | " | Agriculture | 250 | | | " | Trade and commerce | 600 | | | " | Political economy, statistics | 700 | | | " | Military | 300 | 2,350 | | Moral Sciences.— | Philology, &c. | 350 | | | " | Education | 300 | | | " | Moral philosophy | 300 | | | " | Morals | 450 | | | " | Domestic economy | 200 | 1,400 | | Miscellaneous (so classed) | | 1,400 | | | 45,260 | But the Catalogues of New Books fall very short of affording a complete view of the state of popular literature at any given period. We must apply to other sources of information. The publication of 'The Penny Magazine,' and of 'Chambers' Journal,' in 1832, was concurrent with a general increase in the demand for periodical works. At the end of 1831 there were issued 177 monthly publications, a single copy of which cost 17l. 12s. 6d. At the end of 1833 there were 236 monthly periodicals, a single copy of which cost 23l. 3s. 6d. At the end of 1853 there were 362 of the same monthly class, a single copy of which cost 14l. 17s. 6d. In 1831 the average price of the monthly periodicals was 2s.; in 1833, 1s. 11½d.; and in 1853, 9½d. Can there be any doubt of the adaptation of periodical literature, during these years, to the wondrous extension of readers? It appears from 'The London Catalogue of Periodicals,' published by Messrs. Longman and Co., from which we derive the calculations we have now made, that there are 56 weekly periodicals. There were 21 in 1833. But this list, which is adapted for what is known as 'The Trade,' is far from including all the cheap sheets that are issued weekly from the London press. There is a very large class of such publications that are very rarely found in the shops of regular booksellers, either in town or country. Many of these periodicals have the taint upon them of the names of their publishers; and some of them a few years ago were infamous. We do not find in the 'London Catalogue of Periodicals' the names of several works, and of one especially, which present the most remarkable example in our times of the extent to which cheap literature is offered to the people in marts which are comparatively unknown to the upper and middle classes. The facilities of communication have sent an unparalleled quantity of weekly sheets through the land, at a rate of cheapness which defies all competition of literary quality against weight of paper and crowding of print. In every shop of every back-street of London and the larger towns, where a tradesman in tobacco or lollipops or lucifer-matches formerly grew thin upon his small amount of daily halfpence, there now rush in the schoolboy, the apprentice, the milliner, the factory-girl, the clerk, and the small shopkeeper, for their 'London Journal,' 'Family Herald,' 'Reynolds' Miscellany,' and 'Cassell's Paper.' We have ascertained, from sources upon which we can rely, that of these four sheets a million copies are sold weekly. Of the contents of these, and other cheap works, we shall have presently to speak. When we look back at the various periods of English publication, and consider how amazingly the aggregate number of books published in any one period has increased, we must also regard the size and price of the works published to form any adequate notion of the progress of cheap literature. With a general reduction of price during the last twenty years—with the substitution of duodecimos for quartos—and with single volumes beyond all former precedent—there is little doubt that the annual returns of the publishing trade, in all its departments (we include newspapers), are double what they were in 1833. They were estimated then at 2,500,000l. We should not be wide of the mark in considering them at present to have reached to 5,000,000l. As the silk-trade is now to be estimated, not by the number of ladies of fashion who wear brocade on court-days, but of the millions who buy a silk dress for ordinary use; so is the book-trade to be estimated, not by the number of the learned who once bought folios, and of the rich who rejoiced in exclusive quartos, but of the many to whom a small volume of a living author has become a necessity for instruction or for amusement, and who desire to read our established literature in editions well printed and carefully edited, though essentially cheap. This number of readers is constantly increasing, and as constantly pressing for a reduction of price upon modern books of high reputation. Mr. Macaulay's 'Essays' were originally published at 1l. 16s.; they then appeared in one large volume at 1l. 1s. Messrs. Longman now advertise a "People's Edition," in 7 monthly parts at 1s., and in numbers at 1½d. They do so, they say, "on the recommendation of correspondents who have expressed their desire to possess them, but who have found the existing editions beyond their means." In turning over the leaves of the London Catalogue from 1816 to 1851, we rejoice to see how much has been done in this direction, whatever may be the greater amount yet to be done. Of the Poets—Byron, Campbell, Crabbe, Coleridge, Moore, Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, are obtainable at the most reasonable prices, in collected editions. The elder Poets may be had in the Aldine Series, and in new collections, now in course of publication. The most popular of the recent Novelists—Scott, Dickens, D'Israeli, Lytton, Thackeray—are in volumes whose cheapness introduces them to many a fireside where the original editions would find no place. Wilkinson's 'Egypt,' Alison's 'History of Europe,' the works of Chalmers, and many extensive theological books, have been reproduced at cheap rates. The various 'Libraries' which have been published and are still publishing—Bohn's Antiquarian, Classics, Classical, Ecclesiastical, Illustrated, Scientific, and Standard; the Library of Entertaining Knowledge; the Family Library; the Edinburgh Cabinet Library; Lardner's CyclopÆdia; Family Classical Library; Knight's Weekly Volumes; Jardine's Naturalist's Library; Murray's Home and Colonial Library; Sacred Classics; Christian Family Library; Smith's Standard Library; Tegg's Standard Library; National Illustrated Library; Reading for the Rail; Traveller's Library; Standard Novels; Chambers' Miscellany of Facts; Papers for the People; Instructive Library; Weale's Rudimentary Series: these, the more important of the various Collections that can be called cheap, comprise no fewer than 1400 volumes. It would require an enumeration which is the province of the future bibliographer, to show how many separate books, in every department of knowledge, have been issued during the last twenty years, with a distinct reference to the means of the greatest number of readers. But the process here, as in other cases, has necessarily been gradual. The general cheapening of books must be gradual to be safe. The soundings of the perilous sea of publishing must be constantly taken. There is no chart for this navigation which exhibits all the sunken rocks and quicksands. In addition to the Collections just enumerated, we have the new Libraries, whether known as Cheap Series, Parlour Library, Pocket Library, Railway Library, or Readable Books. These are, for the most part, devoted to novels, old and new, and to American reprints. In this form 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' rushed into a circulation which no book—with the exception of the Bible and Prayer-Book, and perhaps some Spelling-Book—ever before attained. Here Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton is to reach a popularity which no novelist ever before reached; and to be paid "the extravagant sum of 20,000l. for the exclusive sale of his works for the next ten years," as we are assured in 'The Times.' We hear of enormous profits made, and fortunes realised, by these books. They meet the eye on every railway stall and in every stationer's window, glittering in green and crimson. But we also sometimes hear of large stocks of unsaleable ventures, and of consequent evil-fortune, in spite of one or two profitable undertakings. We have great confidence in the largest sale of the cheapest edition of an attractive book by an author of reputation; but we have no confidence in the large individual sale of a great number of such distinct books, each jostling the other in the race for popularity. We believe that the sale of many such works has been much exaggerated. We hear that the margin of profit, as commercial men say, is very narrow, and leaves little surplus to cover risk. Of one thing we are clear. Whatever sum may be paid for a great name, the natural sale of books of this class can afford very little for the payment of copyright in ordinary cases. The paper, machine-work, and binding, we are informed, of one of the shilling volumes will cost, for an impression of 10,000, about 220l., and the trade expenses and advertising will raise that cost to 250l. This is 6d. per copy. They are sold wholesale at 8s. for 13 copies, which leaves a surplus of about 60l. But the setting up the types and the stereotyping will cost about 40l. There is 20l. then left for the publisher upon 10,000l. If he sells 20,000l. there is 80l. Where is the fund for the payment of authorship? Is it to be assumed that a sale of 40,000 or 50,000 copies may at present be attained for such works under ordinary conditions? If not, is the cheapest supply of reading for these kingdoms to be kept up by piracies from America or republications of expired copyrights? We doubt if this trade generally is in a healthy position: at any rate, we fear that we must scarcely look to this class of books for making "Cheap Literature" what it might be made by judicious management—an instrument of great public good. Piracy from American authors has been, within these few years, chiefly confined to the shilling Railway Volumes; and it had a great success while all the elements that combine to produce an anti-slavery enthusiasm were in operation. But it has lost the charm of novelty, and the fashion of American novels is now somewhat stale. In the mean while the United States never relax in their course. In Mr. Carey's 'Letters on International Copyright,' published at Philadelphia in 1853, we have some details of the advantage of the fraudulent cheapness to the American public. He says, Mr. Dickens sells 'Bleak House' in England for 21s. (5 dollars); comparing the book with copyright books in America, of which the sale is large, he would expect 3 dollars under the international system. The number of 'Bleak House' supplied to American readers in newspapers and magazines, as well as in the book form, is not less than 250,000, at half a dollar, giving for the whole 125,000 dollars. Mr. Dickens would charge 750,000 dollars:— | Dollars. | | Difference to the American public upon 'Bleak House' | 625,000. | Reckoning in the same way, the following differences are estimated:— | | | Dollars. | | Upon Sir E. Bulwer Lytton's last work, | 166,000 | copies | 350,000 | | Upon Mr. Macaulay's History | 125,000 | " | 400,000 | | Upon Sir A. Alison's History | 25,000 | " | 500,000 | | Upon Jane Eyre | 80,000 | " | 75,000 | | Total difference on five books | | | 1,950,000 | This is a difference of 409,500l. sterling. Mr. Carey deduces from these figures this logical consequence: "Under the system of international copyright, one of two things must be done: either the people must be taxed in the whole of this amount for the benefit of the various persons, abroad and at home, who are now to be invested with the monopoly power, or they must largely diminish their purchases of literary food." He would not have a healthy cheapness, produced in both countries by an open commerce and a fair competition. He would not have a cheapness produced by the publishers of both countries reckoning upon an extended market, and a consequent division of the first expenses of a book. He would have a piratical cheapness—the cheapness of the smuggler and the illicit distiller—"for the general interests of the American people." This ingenious gentleman has a ready defence. There is no copyright in the facts of a book. Copyright is given for the clothing in which the body is produced to the world. Mr. Macaulay has contributed nothing to positive knowledge. Mr. Dickens has gone into a large garden, and made a bouquet of the flowers, although he paid no wages to the man who raised them. He who makes a book uses the common property of mankind, and all he furnishes is the workmanship. Mankind has, therefore, a right to say to the authors, whenever they seek an extension of their privileges, "Be content, my friends; do not risk the loss of a part of what you have, in the effort to obtain more." Mr. Carey is further obliging enough to tell us that in England authors, with a few brilliant exceptions, are condemned to almost hopeless poverty, which he attributes to our system of centralization. Why do not the wealthy people of England give a shilling a head towards paying for the copyright of books, instead of bringing the poverty of authors before the world, and demanding from other countries an extension of the monopoly they have at home? The people of England, through centralization, have become so poor and wretched that there is no demand for books, and no power to compensate the people who make them. Authors there are badly paid and insolently treated. Science is in no request in England, and hence the diminution of supply. In contrast with the limited sale of English books at home is the great extent of sale here. Argal, let the authors starve at home; why should we, the great American people, tax ourselves for their aid? We give them fame, and that is enough. Let not our writers, adds this candid and modest gentleman, desire to barter our great market for literature for one in which Hood was permitted to starve, and Tennyson and others submit to the degradation of receiving public charity in the shape of pensions. The wretched English authors may come and live amongst us, and participate in our advantages. American authorship is Belgrave Square; let it not make a treaty with the Grub Street of England, to have a dinner from our well-furnished tables. We think Mr. Carey, "Author of Principles of Political Economy," has done service by this astounding effrontery. If he reflected the mind of the Government or the people, we should be hopeless of any attempt to unite England and America in the protection of a common literature founded upon a common language. But Mr. Carey does not reflect this mind. He does not even speak for the great body of American authors or publishers. He speaks for the proprietors of the newspapers, which, all over the Union, are filled, week by week, by the piracy of modern English Literature, and especially of English fiction. To keep up this robbery, writers and orators will alike prostitute themselves to defend, unblushingly, what they know to be a disgrace. But in one point Mr. Carey is right. He shows us, upon representations which we cannot doubt, that the works of popular authors, citizens of the United States, and so protected as copyright, are sold in much larger numbers than similar works in our own country, however cheap. How is this? The American people are much more universally readers than the English people. They are better educated. They have a Government that considers it a duty to educate the young without distinction, and to afford the adult every means of intellectual improvement. The American Government has created a reading nation. Our Government has created a people that rush to low casinos in the towns, and to sottish beer-shops in the country. The American Government accords all honour to them who have laboured in the enlightenment of the masses. Our Government wholly passes over every such claim to recognition. It is of little consequence, in the end, what Cabinets or Parliaments do for the advance of education, or the encouragement of men of letters. But it is somewhat unwise, to say the least of it, to provoke, by neglect and by injury, comparison with a nation that cultivates the same language under different institutions, and that can proclaim, in its energetic youth, that it has raised up an intelligent people out of the great mental inheritance to which our rulers have been faithless. By injury? it will be said. The British Government may ignore letters, undervalue writers, barter away its patronage upon ignorance and incapacity—but assuredly it cannot attempt to inflict direct injury upon literature and learning? And yet it does all this. The sale of school-books in the United States has reached an almost fabulous extent. Families have been raised to affluence by the enormous circulation of a Spelling-book or a Dictionary. A successful Grammar is a fortune. He who can produce sensible and amusing Reading-Lessons is better paid than a Secretary of State. Does the Government bestow any gratuities upon such services? Certainly not. But it does not discourage and annihilate them. It does not, as our Government does, interfere with competition by attempting to regulate prices. It does not do the silly thing which M. Louis Blanc wished to do in France for "the organization of literary labour." It has established no manufactory of school-books, produced cheaply, by the tax-payers helping the production. It has no Board of Commissioners, as we have, "to supply the National Schools in Ireland, and the public generally, with works in harmony with an improved system of education, cheap in price and superior in execution."[33] We ask, what possible right has the State to produce such books, and sell them in the open literary markets of this country, to the injury of all who produce similar books by the fair workings of capital and labour? School-books were formerly too dear; but as schools multiplied, cheaper books than the old standard works came into the market, and many took root and flourished. Much of this property has been destroyed by the Government operation; which is not confined to 'Reading Lessons,' but embraces 'Biographical Sketches of Poets'—'Selections from the Poets'—'Epitome of Geographical Knowledge'—'Grammar,' 'Arithmetic,' 'Geometry,' 'Mensuration,' 'Agriculture,' 'Maps.' The compilers of these books and maps are salaried state-servants; the books are printed at the lowest contract; the usual trade allowances are withheld; profit does not enter into price. A book of 17½ sheets demy, or 420 pages, bound in cloth, is sold for sevenpence, as we learn from the Commissioners' Catalogue. This is exactly the cost price for the paper, machine-work, and binding, in the very cheapest market. There is nothing for trade-management, and not one fraction for copyright. Commercial competition is impossible. We say, this is a fraudulent cheapness. All cheapness in books is fraudulent which sets aside a payment for literary labour. This is the cheapness of piracies, whether here or in the United States. It is a cheapness that, if carried out, as it might be by a Government, would degrade literature to the lowest condition, annihilating all invention and improvement. Once concede the principle that the State has a right to produce educational books, except for the supply of schools paid by the State—and even then the policy is very doubtful—and there is no individual literary enterprise that may not be paralyzed and destroyed by this new agency. In England, the only commercial undertaking of the State is that of the Post Office. It is conducted with a profit; it is conducted with a precision and cheapness which really leave few things to be amended. There are especial reasons why the conveyance of letters through the whole civilized world should be the work of the State. No company, no individual, could grapple with such a gigantic task. But is there any other branch of commercial enterprise which the State could undertake with the slightest benefit—without most serious injury? If the end sought is to employ labour to a profit, individual enterprise will accomplish that end far better than the State. If the object is to employ labour that shall be unprofitable, who is to supply the deficiency in the funds that have called into activity the profitable labour? There would indeed be the equality of employments, but it would be the equality of universal poverty. The skilled and the unskilled would be reduced to the same level. There would be no prizes in the social wheel;—the blanks would be something worse than the mere absence of superfluities. The 'Classified Index' contains only about 40,000 references; while the number of books in the 'Catalogue' is 45,000. The book referred to in the Index is only once mentioned, in whatever form it has appeared. To equalize the number, we have added 10 per cent. to each division of the Index, in our calculation. These are the words of an official puff, in 16 pages, called 'An Analysis of the Irish National School-books.' A more impudent document was never put forth by the Curlls of a past or present age. The manufacturers of the Irish Reading Lessons pirated a copyright belonging to the writer of this volume (occupying 47 pages, in 10 of their Lessons), 'The Mineral Kingdom,' which was written by Mr. Leonard Horner. Their 'Analysis' says, that these "most interesting facts and reasonings relating to Organised Remains are extracted from the writings of Buckland and other celebrated Geologists." CHAPTER VI. Cheap Fiction—Penny Periodicals. The Railway Libraries—by which generic term we mean single volumes, printed in small type on indifferent paper, and sold mostly at a shilling—are almost wholly devoted to novels, English or American. Whatever be the quality of the fiction so published, we may ask, without any general depreciation of such works, if the popularity of this class of reading has not a tendency to indispose for other reading, however attractive be the mode in which information, historical, critical, or scientific, be presented; and is it not a necessary consequence that books of another character than novels should be compelled to address themselves to a smaller class of readers, and must, therefore, of necessity be dearer? If this be true of the railway books, it is equally true of the weekly sheets. The demand for fiction amongst the largest class of readers has forced upon every weekly periodical the necessity for introducing fiction in some form or other. The writers of eminence cannot put forth their powers in this direction without charging a higher price for their numbers than those in which inferior writers are employed at low salaries. The higher price necessarily induces a smaller sale. The dealers in cheap periodicals say, "you have no chance for a sale unless you give as much paper as the others give for a penny!" In this respect, some of the more extensively circulated of these sheets would appear to defy all reasonable competition. They are sold for 50s. per thousand; their paper and machine-work cost, at the very least, 45s. Out of this 5s. per thousand they have to pay their publishing expenses, their writers, their woodcuts, their composition, their stereotype casts. It is a neck-and-neck race for a very doubtful "plate;" and what may appear a slight addition to the weight of the "riders," in the shape of another halfpenny a pound upon their paper, would "distance" the greater number of them. When the popular estimate of a publication is that of the square inches which it contains of print, it requires no critical judgment to be assured that the amount of genius or knowledge engaged in its production is not very great. Hence, for the most part, a deluge of stories, that, to mention the least evil of them, abound with false representations of manners, drivelling sentimentalities, and impossible incidents. And yet they are devoured with an earnestness that is almost incomprehensible. The moralist may say— "England, the time is come when thou shouldst wean Thy heart from this emasculating food." How is the weaning to be set about for this babyhood of the popular intellect? The insuperable obstacle to a successful competition with the existing class of penny periodicals is their pre-eminence in external cheapness. They were all founded upon the principle of attraction by low price alone. They employed the meanest "slaves of the lamp" in their production. Sheets came out double the size of any other penny sheet, badly printed on the thinnest paper, but nevertheless they were the largest sheets; their roots were thus planted in the popular earth. Some who bought them turned away from their filth and their folly; others welcomed these qualities. Gradually the sense of the better class of artisans operated, whilst they continued their offences, to reduce their number of customers. They changed their style; they became decent, but they remained stupid. The weeds were kept down, though not rooted out, in that garden: a few gaudy flowers were planted; fruit there was little. They have maintained their hold, by their external cheapness, against any attempt to produce a higher literature, with better paper and print. They have beaten almost every competitor who has sought to address the same class of buyers with something higher, intrinsically as cheap, but not so cheap to the eye. The unequal war is still being waged. In June, 1846, the last number of 'The Penny Magazine' was published. Mr. Knight, who had been its editor from the commencement, in 1832, thus writes in his concluding 'Address to the Reader,' after stating that there then were published 14 three-halfpenny and penny miscellanies, and 37 weekly sheets, forming separate books:—"It is from this competition that the 'Penny Magazine' now withdraws itself. Its editor most earnestly wishes success to those who are keeping on their course with honesty and ability.... He rejoices that there are many in the field, and some who have come at the eleventh hour, who deserve the wages of zealous and faithful labourers. But there are others who are carrying out the principle of cheap weekly sheets to the disgrace of the system, and who appear to have got some considerable hold upon the less informed of the working people, and especially upon the young. There are manufactories in London whence hundreds of reams of vile paper and printing issue weekly; where large bodies of children are employed to arrange types, at the wages of shirt-makers, from copy furnished by the most ignorant, at the wages of scavengers. In truth, such writers, if they deserve the name of writers, are scavengers. All the garbage that belongs to the history of crime and misery is raked together, to diffuse a moral miasma through the land, in the shape of the most vulgar and brutal fiction." This is a curious and instructive record. 'The Penny Magazine,' popular as it once was, to the extent of a sale of 200,000, could not contend with a cheapness that was wholly regardless of quality; and it could not hold its place amidst this dangerous excitement. The editor had his hands fettered by the necessity of keeping up the purely instructive character of that journal. Without a large supply of fiction it necessarily ceased to be popular. A French writer, who laments over the "immondices" of the literature of Paris in 1840, calls for romances "appropriÉs par une imagination souple et brillante au goÛt des classes laborieuses;" and he suggests the principle upon which such works should be founded, viz. "L'Étude des moeurs populaires, entreprise par un esprit pÉnÉtrant, et dirigÉe vers un but philosophique."[34] The "immondices" have for the most part vanished from our English penny literature. The host of penny Newgate novels, whether known as 'The Convict,' 'The Feast of Blood,' 'The Murder at the Old Jewry,' 'Claude Duval,' 'The Hangman's Daughter,' and so forth, may continue to be sold; but, as far as we can trace, there are no novelties in this once popular literature of the gallows. Abominations, called 'Mysteries' and 'Castles,' still lurk in dark corners; but the bulk of single Penny Novels, and the novels which "drag their slow length along" in penny journals, are marvellously changed. The most prudish regard to decency presides over every sentence and syllable. William the Conqueror has lost the brief ignoble title by which the old Saxons designated their oppressor, through a special interdict of the proprietor of one of these papers; and a lady of doubtful character must be mentioned by no more rugged name than that of a belle amie, which may be understood or not. But the "Études des moeurs populaires," and the "but philosophique," have not yet entered into the minds of the conductors of these elaborate works. Their scenes are invariably laid in the lord's palace or the right honourable's mansion; marriages are made at St. George's, Hanover Square, and the diamonds are bought at Storr and Mortimer's. If a young lady, who has the slight misfortune to be connected by the filial tie with a convicted felon, has a quarrel with her juvenile lover, she immediately rushes to the arms of an ancient baronet, who conducts her the next morning to the altar of his parish church. Boileau said of Mademoiselle Scudery, that she would never let her heroine get out of a house till she had taken an inventory of all the furniture. So, for the bewilderment of those who read these weekly novels by the one glimmering candle upon the deal table, their sick ladies recline in easy chairs, "astral" lamps diffuse their rich glow upon crimson curtains, and aromatic perfumes fill the air from pastiles burning in miniature castles of gilded porcelain. The style of these productions is magnificent: with golden zones on the summits of the mountains, and roseate tints edging the canopy of heaven; plants drooping with voluptuous languor, and shining insects skimming the air, as if borne on the wings of ardent passion. In all this we are speaking au pied de la lettre. Johnson described three sorts of unnatural style—the bombastic, the affected, and the weak. Most of these performances unite the three qualities, and are equally satisfactory to the "love of imbecility," which Johnson thought was to be found in many. We have only seen one penny journal which places its incidents, and somewhat adapts its language, in consonance with the habits of the classes which these works seek to interest. In 'The Leisure Hour,' issued by the Religious Tract Society, we have an Australian story, with 'Sydney by Gaslight.' We are now amongst convicts, and hear drunken shouts come out from miserable huts. The success of this publication is considerable. Perhaps those who really understand such matters may say of the writer of these laudable attempts to imitate the homely style, something akin to what the great Pierce Egan said of a fashionable novelist twenty years ago—"Ah! he's very clever, but uncommon superficial in slang." Nevertheless, it is satisfactory to find that a mean has been sought, in the quarter where we might least have expected it, between the representations of humble and even of low life which are corrupting, and those pretended pictures of society which exhibit no life at all. In the number of 'The Leisure Hour' for February 16, 1854, there is a clever woodcut of a night auction at Sydney, which is as suggestive of a congregation of real vulgar sellers and bidders, with the necessary accompaniments of gin and tobacco, as might be connected with any of the exciting scenes of 'Life in London' at any period. The pictures of the penny sheets which the masses now greedily buy are quite genteel. This is something to reflect upon. Some of the members of the Tract Society may think that "Chaos is come again." We do not. This sort of subject will be attractive to the better portion of male readers amongst the artisans, and especially amongst the very large number who belong to "temperance societies;" but for the girls, who devour the novels of the other penny journals, certainly not. Those who have been watching the workings of the penny literature are unanimous in their conviction that very few men read these mawkish and unnatural fictions. The readers for the most part belong, in point of cultivation, to the same class of females, who, half a century ago, gave up their whole leisure—if they did not neglect every domestic duty—for the ghosts and the elopements of 'The Minerva Press.' The intelligence of the readers is the same, however widened the attraction. But, with all their bad taste, there is partial merit and manifest utility in some portions of the best of these penny journals. 'The Family Herald' has constantly a serious article of great good sense and shrewdness. This paper, and one or two others, have pages of "Answers to Correspondents," which, for the most part, contain useful information and judicious advice. Real young ladies often pour their doubts into the ear of this "Family" oracle, about love, and courtship, and marriage; and, as far as we can judge, receive very safe counsel. In the whole range of these things we can detect nothing that bears a parallel with what used to be called "the blasphemous and seditious press." Neither, although these papers do not wholly abstain from comment upon what is passing in the world, can they be called newspapers. We see, however, that the new trump of war is calling up again one or two of the old class of unstamped violators of the law. In quiet times they cannot flourish. They may be difficult to suppress, 'Now all the youth of England are on fire.' CHAPTER VII. Degrees of Readers—General Improvement—Newspaper Press—Newspaper Press National—Agricultural Readers—General desire for Amusement—Supply of real Knowledge. Our readers can scarcely have failed to make for themselves the deduction which naturally arises out of this survey of the progress of popular literature—that there always have been, still are, and always will be, various classes of readers and purchasers; and that the invariable progress of knowledge and intelligence—from the learned to the rich, from the rich to the middle classes, from the middle classes to the multitude—has produced as invariably a corresponding change in the number of books published, their quality, and their price. As the rich began to gather knowledge, books ceased to be wholly adapted to the learned or professional student; as the burgesses began to employ their leisure in reading, books ceased to be dependent upon courtly influence; as the multitude acquired the rudiments of instruction, books became less conventional, and began to adapt themselves to all classes. But it cannot, without a judicial blindness, be assumed that we are arrived at that state in which there are no degrees of intellectual advancement. It is said, to use the language of the most popular journal of our day, that the masses "do not yet feel the assurance that, if they go in thousands to the counters of the great publishing houses, as they congregate around the more plebeian shops, they will get the exact article they want, or what they consider value for their money." Here is the point. The masses, who are yet more imperfectly educated than some of their own class, and most of the class above them, would not consider, as they have never yet considered, solid and instructive reading "value for their money." Unquestionably "books to please the million must not only be good but attractive." The chief popular labour of the last quarter of a century has been to convert the ponderous ores of learning into the fine gold of knowledge. The multitude have been reached in many directions; and the influences of "good but attractive" books have penetrated where the books themselves have not yet had a direct influence. But the multitude stand precisely in the same relation to works of instruction, even the most attractive, as they do to Mechanics' Institutes and AthenÆums. In Manchester and its dependencies, in 1851, there were 3447 members of these Institutions, and 1793 pupils in classes.[35] But the great mass of the youth of both sexes in Manchester were frequenting the Casinos. Here they neither drank, nor danced, nor gambled: they listened to recitations and comic songs at a penny an hour. They wanted mere amusement, and they found it. It is the same with the great bulk of the readers of cheap books. "It is most worthy of note," says the writer just mentioned, whose anxiety for cheap literature we honour and appreciate, "that, when there has been no doubt of the substantial value of the commodity issued from the Row or Albemarle Street, the sale of the books has been by no means equivocal." Certainly not. Macaulay and Layard have found large numbers of purchasers, and will find them, in their cheap form. But are these purchasers what are called, in the same breath, "the multitude"—"the needy"? Not at all. Even the most successful of the periodical works above a penny—'Chambers' Journal,' 'Household Words,'—reach only the advanced guard of this class. Mr. Dickens collected around him at Birmingham such an audience as never before waited upon an author. He read his beautiful, humanizing 'Christmas Carol' to two thousand working-men. They felt every point—they laughed, or they grew serious, with understanding. But are we to suppose that the whole mass of the mechanical classes—men, women, and children—throughout the kingdom, would rush by millions to buy 'The Christmas Carol' at a penny or two—at a price that would compensate in fame what was wanting in profit? Its sterling merit—its nature, its simplicity, its purity, its quiet humour—require a far higher amount of taste and cultivation to appreciate than the immaturity of mind to which the coarseness and imbecility of the penny journals are acceptable. An author of less popular acceptation published a poem at a farthing, but we never heard that he employed a steam-press in its production. The multitude have their own weekly literature, and we have seen what it is. Are the novels of the author of 'Pelham' to be speedily found in every cottage of the farm-labourer, and in every garret of the Lancashire cotton-spinner? The time may come, but it is not as yet. If a despotic government, in the desire to disseminate knowledge, were to follow the example which our free Government has set with regard to the 'School-books published by authority of the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland,' they might produce sound popular literature as cheap again as the most adventurous of publishers. But if they left competition free to what they considered unsound knowledge—if they permitted the lowest-priced Fiction, however bad or indifferent, to circulate without their unequal competition—we believe the free-traders would beat the monopolists in point of numbers; and it would be found an easier task, even with every commercial disadvantage of price, to "tickle and excite the palate" than "strengthen the constitution." Do such considerations as these make us hopeless of the steady progress of a sound as well as cheap popular literature? Decidedly no. There is improvement all around us. The halfpenny ballad of Seven Dials is not yet extinct; but let the collectors look sharply about them, for that relic of the chap-books, with the woodcuts that have served every generation, will soon be gone. In its place has come the decent penny book of a hundred songs. The shades of Scott, and Moore, and Campbell will not quarrel with this new popularity. There are "flash" songs; but they are not for the penny buyers. Thackeray has described the dens in which these abominations are current. The whole aspect of the humbler press has changed within these few years. Unquestionably the people have changed. Visit, if you can, the interior of that marvellous human machine, the General Post-Office, on a Friday evening, from half-past five to six o'clock. Look with awe upon the tons of newspapers that are crowding in to be distributed through the habitable globe. Think silently how potent a power is this for good or for evil. You turn to one of the boxes of the letter-sorters, and your guide will tell you, "this work occupies not half the time it formerly did, for everybody writes better." General education furnishes the solution of the otherwise doubtful origin of the improvement, in all the more manifest characteristics of improvement, of all popular literature. In 1801 the annual circulation of newspapers in England and Wales was 15 millions, and in Scotland 1 million. In 1853 the annual circulation of England and Wales was 72 millions, and of Scotland 8 millions, that of Ireland being also about 8 millions. In September, 1836, the stamp-duty on newspapers was reduced to one penny. Immediately previous to the reduction the annual circulation of newspapers in Great Britain was about 29 millions. The increase, therefore, in seventeen years, has been 51 millions. We have cast up the twenty-two folio pages of the 'Return of the number of Newspaper Stamps, at one penny, issued in 1853,' and we find these results, as derived from the stamps, excluding supplements, used by 913 newspapers in England, 18 in Wales, 146 in Scotland, and 121 in Ireland, making a total number of 1198. But it must be borne in mind that about one-half of the publications in this return, called newspapers, are not newspapers in any sense of the word. Every publication can be stamped as a newspaper, for which the proprietor and printer give the necessary legal securities; and thus hundreds of price-currents, catalogues, and circulars—and many literary journals which are only partially stamped, and which none but political pedants, calling for a definition, term newspapers—find their way into this Official Return. There are, in round numbers, 600 newspapers proper in the United Kingdom. There are in London 14 daily papers, 6 twice and thrice a week, and 71 weekly; and about 500 provincial papers in the United Kingdom. Of the London Daily Papers, about 24 millions are annually circulated, of which the 'Times' has the lion's share of 14 millions. There are four weekly papers, published at the surpassingly cheap rate of threepence, which circulate 13 millions. The 'Illustrated London News' has a circulation of 4 millions; and eleven other leading weekly papers issue, annually, 6 millions. There are 6 religious papers, which have a circulation of about a million and a quarter. Thus, 36 London publications engross 48 million stamps, out of 71 millions. Of the Provincial English Press there are 26 great towns which number 80 papers, and these 80 consume 13 millions of stamps. We have, therefore, only 10 millions more to distribute amongst the entire newspaper press of England. The Welsh annual circulation is under a million. We have abstracted from the Official Return the number of stamps used annually by papers published in great cities and towns, especially the large marts of commerce and manufactures:— | Towns. | Number of | Aggregate | | separate | annual | | papers. | sale. | | Birmingham | 3 | 871,000 | | Bristol | 4 | 596,075 | | Cambridge | 2 | 216,500 | | Carlisle | 2 | 263,500 | | Derby | 4 | 249,700 | | Doncaster | 2 | 178,500 | | Exeter | 3 | 398,315 | | Hereford | 2 | 278,000 | | Hull | 2 | 347,000 | | Leeds | 3 | 1,107,875 | | Leicester | 4 | 240,500 | | Liverpool | 8 | 1,702,588 | | Manchester | 3 | 1,741,300 | | Newcastle | 4 | 684,542 | | Norwich | 3 | 419,950 | | Nottingham | 3 | 324,000 | | Oxford | 3 | 252,000 | | Plymouth | 4 | 309,500 | | Preston | 3 | 469,500 | | Sheffield | 3 | 580,950 | | Stamford | 1 | 571,826 | | Stafford | 1 | 384,000 | | Sunderland | 4 | 191,142 | | Wolverhampton | 3 | 181,500 | | Worcester | 3 | 320,052 | | York | 3 | 465,200 | | 80 | 13,245,015 | The altered tone and ability of newspapers would open too wide a subject to be here dwelt upon in detail. One of the weekly threepenny papers has attained an enormous sale—a sale of 4½ millions annually—by discarding what was offensive to public morals, under the management of a man of letters who has a reputation to maintain. The Satirists and Paul Prys are gone. The extension of the mental labourers for newspapers, in proportion to the extension of the demand, has followed the same course as that of every other production of the press, from the days of the first printers. At the beginning of the present century the local newspapers "had no editorial comments whatever,"[36] and scarcely an original paragraph. The conductors of our 500 provincial journals are now watching for every particle of news in their own districts; reporting public meetings; waiting for electric telegraphs; pondering upon grave questions of social economy; and, to the best of their judgment, fairly representing the course of events. How much of this intelligent and honourable spirit they owe to the London Newspaper Press is not for us to decide. We believe the newspaper influence upon the people to be for good, because the Newspaper Press is National. A witness, giving evidence before the Select Committee on Newspaper Stamps, 1851, said, "If the Committee were to look at 'The Weekly Dispatch' twenty years ago, its general character was very much worse than it is now. Then it was a so-called radical, almost a blasphemous, scurrilous, and contemptible paper, but with an enormous circulation. Now other papers have so much improved, that 'The Weekly Dispatch' has been compelled, in its own defence, very materially to change its tone." But what improved the "other papers," and compelled them to seek honest means of "an enormous circulation"? We answer—The advanced intelligence of the people. Books had begun their own work in the career of public enlightenment. Now, newspapers and books are working together for the same object. It is desired by some to make newspapers supersede books, by abolishing the stamp, and thus converting all popular literature into news. We have no faith in the process. An American told the Committee on Stamps that "the only knowledge which the working-classes would appreciate is contained in newspapers; they address themselves much more to politics than to science or literature." The witness had his own country in his mind, where the assertion is to some extent true. But in the American newspapers, almost universally, there is something more than "politics." All over the Union the newspapers are filled, week by week, by the piracy of modern English literature, especially of English fiction. Whether the "working classes" read the politics, and neglect the literature, maybe doubted. If politics are independent of science and literature, the study is worth little. It is degrading. We doubt if this disposition, carried to excess, will make a wise people, or a happy people. The opinion of an American is worth little upon such a question in England. There is no parallel in the condition of the people of the United States. The geographical position, and the separate constitutions of individual states, necessarily demand many newspapers. Thus the newspapers of the United States, even with their large circulation, are essentially local. The English papers, we repeat, are national. The papers of the capital are the papers of the empire. They chiefly, with their wonderful organization, supply the material for the twenty-seven millions of these islands, and the other millions of our race spread over the habitable globe in our colonies, to learn, to consider, to know their rights, to perform their duties. Could this unequalled instrument of knowledge be kept efficiently at work, while every petty printer of every parish was ready to make a venture for a thousand penny subscribers to his Argus or his Luminary, without incurring any of the prodigious cost of a London daily morning paper? If the time should come when the land should be filled with penny newspapers, it would be the same with newspapers as it is now with the weekly unstamped sheets. Quantity, not quality, would be the criterion of excellence. The lower grade of literary labourers would be multiplied tenfold. Unscrupulous employers would rise up on every side, who would go for the "immondices" if decency failed; and for disorder if tranquillity were growing unprofitable. The rich would be set against the poor, and the poor against the rich. Those who now organise strikes by their eloquence would work more effectually with their pen; and employers would not be without their organs to defend harshness and oppression. Sects would denounce each other in weekly journals, to be sold by the pew-opener; and the Snoreum Vestry would enter upon a wordy war with their neighbours of Muggleton. Let us "study to be quiet." It is proposed to establish penny newspapers for the especial benefit of the agricultural labourers. How are they to be circulated? If postage is to be paid in addition to the price, there is little gained over the present system; for there are published, weekly, about 300,000 newspapers at 3d. If they do not go by post, how are they to reach the scattered hamlets? This is really the difficulty, with regard to all periodical literature, in raising up agricultural labourers into a population of readers. It is satisfactory to know that the keys to knowledge—the power of reading and writing—are being as freely imparted to the rural population as to those of towns. There is progress. In 1841 the proportion, to all marriages, of those who signed the marriage-register with marks, was—men, 33 per cent.; women, 49 per cent. In 1853 the proportion was—men, 30 per cent.; women, 45 per cent. In 1863 the effect of the education of the last ten years will be tested upon the same principle. But it is to be noted, in the Registrar-General's Returns for 1853, that in the Agricultural South-Eastern Division, as well as in other agricultural districts, there was slight difference in the proportion between males and females; while in the North-Western Manufacturing Division the number of females who could not write was nearly double that of the males. In the South-Eastern Division, comprising the rural parts of Surrey and Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, and Berkshire, in the cases of 11,537 marriages, 3457 men and 3749 women signed with marks. In the North-Western Division, comprising Cheshire and Lancashire, in the cases of 24,877 marriages, 8729 men and 15,443 women signed with marks. There cannot be a greater proof of the influence of a resident clergy, looking diligently to National Schools, and perhaps stimulated by the zeal of dissent in the same useful direction, than this fact. It makes us hopeful of the eventual advance of the rural population to the condition of a reading people. But the question always arises—What are they to read? What will they read? Is the edge of the cup not only to be honeyed, but is the whole cup to be filled with sweets? How are we to find the mean between what is dry and what is useless—what is plain and what is childish? A witness of well-known intelligence told the Committee on Newspaper Stamps that in his village he tried the experiment of reading 'The Times' to an evening-class of adult labourers, and that he could not read twenty lines without feeling that there were twenty words in it which none of his auditors understood. He wanted, therefore, cheap newspapers, that would be so written as not to puzzle the hearers or readers by such words as "operations," "channel," or " fleet." For ourselves, we would rather endure as much book ignorance as we endured in the first quarter of this century, than believe that knowledge might be promoted by writing down to the intelligence of the least instructed class; and that they could be raised up into enlightenment upon this plan of Mr. Hickson, to have newspapers that would reach their minds like "school-primers, containing words of one or two syllables." Such partial enlightenment would be general degradation. Upon looking around upon all the various phases of Cheap Literature which now present themselves in these kingdoms, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that, in proportion as the number of readers has increased, the desire of the mass of the population has been rather for passing amusement than solid instruction. There is one very obvious reason for this. The people of this country work harder than any other people, not only from the absolute necessity of the competition around them, but through the energy of their race. It cannot, therefore, in the nature of things, be expected that much of the reading of all classes should be other than for amusement. Further, when we consider how recent has been the training for any reading amongst a large proportion of those who have become readers, we can scarcely look for a great amount of serious application in their short leisure after a hard working-day. The entertainment which is now presented to all, whether it be in the shape of a shilling novel or a penny journal, is not debasing; it may enfeeble the intellect, but it does not taint it. How are we to deal with this universal desire for amusement? Not, we think, by any direct efforts at its counteraction, either by individuals or societies. We have before us three volumes, just completed, of a most excellent penny weekly publication of 'The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge,' entitled 'The Home Friend.' It is cheap, even by comparison with the cheapest of the class. It consists of twenty-four octavo pages, and is excellently printed on superior paper. The old patronising style of such works is given up. It deals with grave subjects in an agreeable spirit. In the preface to the first volume, the editor rejoices that the Society is enabled to publish a work attainable by "the tenant of the lowliest cottage, which a century ago could only be purchased by the opulent few." But it is not a matter of congratulation that this work, like others professing the same aims, has not had any great success, from the absolute want of buyers. It was thought that the members of the Society could have commanded a great weekly circulation amongst their neighbours. The average sale never went beyond 12,000. What, then, is to be the course of the real friends of popular instruction? We think it is, to let the existing cheap literature purify itself. We have got beyond the scurrilous stage—the indecent stage—the profane stage—the seditious stage. Let us hope that the frivolous stage, in which we are now to some extent abiding, will in time pass on to a higher taste, and a sounder mental discipline. "Confidence," said Chatham, "is a plant of slow growth." So is taste; so is a love of knowledge for its own sake. Let us make real instruction as attractive as we can; but let us have no compromises under the pretence of gilding the pill. Study is study, and amusement is amusement. Let the people learn, and learn they will, in time; but let us abandon all the old, childish attempts of cheating them into learning. The circle of those who are attaining sound knowledge is steadily widening. Already, as the circle has widened, the means of acquiring information have been offered to "the masses," and even to "the needy," at a rate of cheapness quite unequalled by any previous attempts to make sound knowledge popular. We now especially allude to 'The Penny CyclopÆdia'—a work of which the literature and engravings alone cost the publisher, as he has recorded, the large sum of 42,000l. Those who affect to believe that nothing has been done for the cheapening of books, should recollect that, before the existence of this CyclopÆdia, no great work of reference of this nature could be obtained under 40l. But 'The Penny CyclopÆdia,' large as was its sale, was not profitable; it involved an enormous loss. The writer, in his 'Struggles of a Book,' has stated that the paper-duty operated as a burthen upon 'The Penny CyclopÆdia' to the extent of 32,000l. He adds,—"Had that sum of 32,000l. been actually saved to me, I should not have been a pound richer by the publication of 'The Penny CyclopÆdia.' But with the saving I should not have been to that amount poorer." Compared with the vast outlay, 'The Penny CyclopÆdia' was set at too low a price for the probable demand. The class of buyers for instruction was not large enough to carry off 40,000 copies, which would have yielded adequate profit. The very word "Penny" was then repulsive, and implied something low, as apprehended by the rich vulgar. Moreover, the book occupied eleven years in its issue, and its sale fell from 50,000 at the beginning to less than 20,000 in the end. No work that occupied more than four or five years in its completion was ever successful in this country. In the publication of 'The English CyclopÆdia,' which is founded upon 'The Penny CyclopÆdia,' a more prudent course has been adopted. The new book is issued in four divisions, which will form four separate CyclopÆdias of Geography, Natural History, Sciences, and Biography, each of which will be completed in little more than two years from its commencement. Comparing the two books—'The Penny' and 'The English'—we can readily see the vast augmentations of knowledge during twenty years that render the complete re-modelling of such a work absolutely necessary. In every branch of exact knowledge this re-modelling has become indispensable; and upon other works of instruction many earnest labourers are so engaged. Publishers cannot now afford to let their books, especially their educational books, remain without improvement. It is thus that, in spite of the tendency to light reading, the supply of real knowledge is kept up. Those who find an ally of knowledge in the purer and more ennobling fiction, such as our literature, past and present, abundantly supplies, are gradually brought into the extending circle of earnest readers. The great region beyond is still little cultivated; but even there the subsoil-plough has been at work, and there is some grain amidst the weeds. The weeds cannot be rooted out by any sudden husbandry. CHAPTER VIII. Free Libraries—In Towns—In Rural Districts—Influences of the best Books. It is difficult to point out a direct practical remedy for much that is injurious in our cheapest popular literature; and especially any remedy that could be supplied by the State. We cannot cure folly by enactments, however we may try to repress crime. "These things will be, and must be; but how they shall be least hurtful, how least enticing, herein consists the grave and governing wisdom of a State. To sequester out of the world into Atlantic and Utopian policies, which never can be drawn into use, will not mend our condition, but to ordain wisely as in this world of evil, in the midst whereof God hath placed us unavoidably." This noble sentence, from Milton's 'Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing,' suggests some remarks which, however painful to utter, no one who thinks honestly upon the subject of popular enlightenment can disguise. There is NO "grave and governing wisdom" in the English State—there is NO desire "to ordain wisely"—in any matter connected with the educational advancement of the people. The greatest discouragement in the first stage,—the most niggardly support in the second,—have been given to the education of the young. With the exception of Schools of Design, which, however useful, have a very limited object, the education of the adult has been retarded by every possible legislative effort, direct or indirect. In 1849 a Select Committee of the House of Commons, to inquire into "the best means of extending the establishment of libraries, freely open to the public, especially in large towns, in Great Britain and Ireland," came to the unanimous resolution that "our present inferior position is unworthy of the power, the liberality, and the literature of the country." An Act had been passed in 1845, by which Town Councils, in Municipal Boroughs having 10,000 inhabitants and upwards, in England and Wales, were empowered to establish Museums at their own discretion. In 1850, seconding the Report of the Committee of 1849, a Bill was brought in "for enabling Town Councils to establish Public Libraries and Museums," in towns of the like large population. The proposal was damaged by the device of requiring that a poll of the burgesses should first have been duly taken on the question, and that a rate of one halfpenny in the pound should be the maximum to be levied by a majority of votes. The consequence was obvious. Those of the rate-payers who had the low shopkeeping jealousy of extending knowledge to those they presumed to call beneath them, rejected the proposition for establishing Free Libraries at Birmingham and at Exeter. In the mean time the difficulties have been surmounted in four great Lancashire towns, Manchester, Liverpool, Salford, Bolton, where 50,000l. have been raised, chiefly by voluntary subscription, for Free Libraries and Museums; and 60,000 volumes have been purchased for the open and unrestricted use, in the libraries and at home, of every member of the community, from the highest to the humblest. The experiment has been completely successful. One of the most satisfactory results has been that, amidst the hardest worked population in the world—those who come from their factories with the honourable stain of labour on their hands and brows—the most exemplary care has been taken of the books borrowed. If Free Libraries are good for the greatest marts of industry, are they not good for the smaller? Mr. Ewart, the unwearied mover in this object, brings in a Bill in the Session of 1854, to extend the Act of 1850 to towns of less population and to the metropolitan boroughs; and, further, to remedy a great defect in the former Bill, that the money raised by the halfpenny rate might be applied to purchase books as well as to provide buildings. On the 5th of April the House of Commons throws out this Bill, under the most frivolous pretexts; the real object being to truckle to the prejudices of those who in all times have systematically opposed the progress of knowledge, when there is a chance of extending it to the people universally. "Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee." It is in connexion with all we have said in the preceding pages, about the character and tendency of cheap popular literature, that we have looked forward with hope to the general establishment of Free Libraries in town and country. Mechanics' Institutes, and Literary and Scientific Institutions, valuable as they have been, do not embrace the class for which they were originally intended. According to returns prepared by Dr. Hudson, Secretary of the Manchester AthenÆum, in 1851, there were 720 such institutions, with 120,000 members, and they possessed 815,000 volumes of books. But the same zealous person honestly tells us that the majority of Literary Institutions comprise professional men, the higher shopkeepers, and the managers of large firms; that the clerk and the shopman will not go where they have a chance of being looked coldly on by their employers or superiors in service, and resort to Mechanics' Institutes, where their presence effectually drives out the fustian jackets. To remedy this was one of the especial objects of Free Libraries, where books should be liberally provided for all, whether for reference or home reading. A large majority of the borrowers of books from the Manchester Free Library belong to the operative class. Is it not of some importance that the warehousemen, packers, artisans, machinists, mill-hands male and female, assistants in shops male and female, dressmakers,—should have access to the standard works of English literature, and the current books of the modern press? Is there no great beneficial effect to be produced by the 77,232 volumes that in the first year were issued from the same Manchester Free Library, comprising—in theology, 1130; philosophy, 845; history, 22,837; law, politics, and commerce, 839; sciences and arts, 4319; and general literature, including poetry, fiction, essays, and periodicals, 47,262? Is it of no importance that, in the same period, 61,080 volumes have been used in the reference department? How long are those who are apt to think that "The wealthiest man among us is the best," to influence the better thoughts, and control the higher impulses, of those who have no vain fears that knowledge, however widely extended, may produce evil to society? The object of the general diffusion of knowledge is not to render men discontented with their lot—to make the peasant yearn to become an artisan, or the artisan dream of the honours and riches of a profession—but to give the means of content to those who, for the most part, must necessarily remain in that station which requires great self-denial and great endurance; but which is capable of becoming not only a condition of comfort, but of enjoyment, through the exercise of these very virtues, in connexion with a desire for that improvement of the understanding which, to a large extent, is independent of rank and riches. It is a most fortunate circumstance, and one which seems especially ordained by Him who wills the happiness of his creatures, that the highest, and the purest, and the most lasting sources of enjoyment are the most accessible to all. The great distinction that has hitherto prevailed in the world is this,—that those who have the command of riches and of leisure have alone been able, in any considerable degree, to cultivate the tastes that open these common sources of enjoyment. The first desire of every man is, no doubt, to secure a sufficiency for the supply of the physical necessities of our nature; but in the equal dispensations of Providence it is not any especial portion of the condition even of the humblest among us who labours with his hands to earn his daily bread, that his mind should be shut out from the gratifications which belong to the exercise of our observing and reflecting faculties. View the agricultural labourer as we have been too long accustomed to see him—a rude untutored hind. His most ordinary occupations place him amongst scenes highly favourable to the cultivation of some of the purest and most peaceful thoughts. The general introduction of agricultural machinery and agricultural chemistry has an inevitable tendency to demand a race of skilled labourers, instead of unintellectual serfs. But how do we deal with the labourer and his family? We educate the boys and girls up to a certain point; we give them the rudiments of knowledge; we are now asked to go further, and to teach them "common things," by which we understand, chiefly, the practical applications of science. But, once off the school-form, the rural boy is to find his evening amusement in the beershop, and the girl to make her way to the next town, in search of some gaiety that ends fatally. Home has no charms for these. Books might be some attraction, but how are they to be got? There are books which well-meaning people will lend—but they are for the most part of an exclusively serious character. None of the fair features of knowledge are presented to them; no "perpetual feast of nectared sweets." They are offered the Sunday sermon without the Sunday holiday. It is clear that this system will not do; and the most sensible in the country have abandoned it. We have before us a catalogue of the 'Windsor Park Library, under the patronage of His Royal Highness the Ranger.' This Park Library, established by Prince Albert, is for the use of all those in the local employ of the Crown. These comprise a population of about 300, of which 100 are subscribers to this library, at sixpence a quarter. It is self-governed, with the assistance of the curate of the Park, who has the right of approval of the books given or purchased. Here is an agricultural population of a mixed character—keepers, bailiffs, woodmen, ploughmen, and field and forest lads. This hard-working and comfortable population is not crammed with "harsh and crabbed" knowledge. There are good books in the library—divinity, history, biography, natural history—but there is abundance of poetry and fiction. The result is that the library is most popular; that it has a visible influence on the families of the subscribers; that the population thus intellectually raised, in the power of happily employing their small leisure, are a consented home-keeping population. There are, no doubt, peculiar advantages in their position; but the intelligence which is thus cultivated amongst their dependants by the highest in the land would ultimately raise every rural population, if the obvious means were not too commonly neglected. We have spoken strongly about the indifference of the State to the establishment of Free Libraries in populous towns. But even those who have most strenuously urged this measure have said nothing about such institutions in rural districts. We ask, why not? The necessity is as great, perhaps greater. A ready access to instructive books, and amusing books, is the desire which most naturally suggests itself to the young people who have left the schools which the State recognizes, however imperfectly. The desire cannot be gratified except through some occasional benevolence. Thus the neglected mind first grows listless—then corrupt. Dangerous excitement begins the career which ends in habitual degradation. There could be nothing easier that to make the National School a Free Library also. The room is vacant after the hours of work; the schoolmaster is the ready librarian. It would be the truest economy in parishes to provide such Free Libraries out of the ordinary rates, if Parliament were to give them an enabling power. Gratuitous vaccination, preventive measures against contagion, are cheerfully paid for. Why not a payment of the most limited amount—a farthing on each pound of rental—to keep the people sober, to render them domestic, to raise them gradually but surely to the capacity of discharging those labours with skill which have been formerly intrusted to mere animal power? It would be well, we think, to make the experiment. In thus advocating the general establishment of Free Libraries, we believe that we are pointing out the only practicable course for counteracting the tendencies of cheap periodical literature. The principle which is now carried, as we have endeavoured to show, to a dangerous and ridiculous excess, is to give the greatest possible quantity at the lowest possible price. The principle is destructive to the employment of the highest class of literary labour. It involves the natural mediocrity or positive baseness of that quality which is not visible on the surface. The counteracting principle is to make the best books accessible to all; and not to imagine that the evil is not counteracted if those who have access to the best books prefer the entertaining to the severe. One of the most eminent cultivators of the highest knowledge, Sir John Herschel, has told us a great truth in this matter, which ought never to be forgotten. Defending what he calls "the invaluable habit of resorting to books for pleasure," as the main desire of those who "have grown up in a want of instruction, and in a carelessness of their own improvement," he says—"If we would generate a taste for reading, we must, as our only chance of success, begin by pleasing.... In the higher and better class of works of fiction and imagination, duly circulated, you possess all you require to strike your grappling-iron into their souls, and chain them, willing followers, to the car of advancing civilization." We have said that cheap literature has got beyond its scurrilous, indecent, profane, and seditious stages. Six years ago it exhibited every one of these qualities. We think it will not return to them. But there is an element of danger which, if not so revolting, is far more formidable. It is that element which has for its materials the disputes between labour and capital. There is ignorance on both sides of this question. There is indifference on the part of the State. A period of great and increasing commercial prosperity has softened down many of the coarser and fiercer aspects of these disputes; but in no case have they been reduced to an intelligible philosophy on the part of employers or of workmen. Let the prosperity of trade be interrupted by war; let our markets be narrowed; let profits necessarily fall, and wages with them; and what lessons, we may ask, have been acquired of mutual dependence and mutual interests, of conciliation and of brotherhood, in the season which was favourable to instruction? Political economy has been too long taught in a onesided spirit; but, nevertheless, its great truths remain unaltered. Are the people unwilling to search them out? Practically, are they reluctant to apply them? They know, right well, that profits and wages are distinct matters; that one belongs to capital and the other to labour; that if they are to have both they must become capitalists. They try, upon the smallest, and therefore the most hazardous scale, to unite labour and capital by cooperation. They cannot try the principle upon a larger scale, through the evil agency of our laws of partnership. The Legislature inquires into the matter, and there leaves it. The Legislature complains that strikes are ruinous to all concerned, and does nothing to bring about that union—a union of feelings as well as interests—which would destroy strikes. The Legislature says that the people have no economical or historical knowledge, and forbids Free Libraries. Sixty years ago, Burke calculated that there were eighty thousand readers in this country. If Burke had lived in times when there are fourteen hundred thousand buyers of cheap weekly sheets, whose readers probably amount to five millions, would his great philosophical mind have said, as modern legislation says, Do whatever you can to prevent this reading going in a right direction; you cannot stop reading, but you can keep the cheap literature debased, by denying the people access to the great original thinkers who would lift them out of their intellectual twilight into a brighter day? Would Edmund Burke have given such counsel? Would he have shrunk from admitting the people to the safe and enduring equality of a participation in the common property of mind? He would have said, as he said in 1770—"All the solemn plausibilities of the world have lost their reverence and effect." He would now have added—Build your future authority and your respect, not upon ignorance, but upon knowledge. For the proper supply of such Free Libraries, we have a new class of Books rising fast into importance—Books of established value, carefully edited—the Poets, the Historians, the Critical and Philosophical Writers. The great Divines will not be neglected in this good work. There cannot be cheaper books of this class than Mr. Murray's 'British Classics,' than Mr. Bohn's various series, than several Collections of the Poets now in course of publication. We rejoice to see well-printed books for the Library appear at half the old prices; and to know that there is some chance of the eyes of a generation not prematurely perishing under the inflictions of a typography inferior to the ordinary newspaper. Free Libraries would create a large and certain demand for such works. With the majority, the fame of our great writers is little more than the scrolls upon their tombs. Let our glorious Literature no longer be, for the People, "The Monument of banish'd Minds." THE END.
Now Ready, 2 Vols. Fcap. 8vo. 10s.
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